AI has officially spilled over into high school highlight films

Much like NIL and the transfer portal, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the next wave set to have a huge impact on our game.

In a lot of ways, it's a good thing.

AI is already being used to help coaches break down film, find tendencies, predicting a team's next play call, developing game plans, and a host of other ways I'm sure I have yet to discover or comprehend.

By and large, for those that find a way to harness it, AI can save us time, provide valuable information, and empower us.

However, there is a dark side. There always is, isn't there?

I can recall when people started to utilize AI to take over press conferences. The phenomenon seemed to start with political videos, where politicians words were changed and manipulated, and it was a matter of what seemed like days before someone was taking a coach's press conference and doing the same, but in an attempt to be funny and outrageous instead. With the first iteration of AI, you could tell if you listened close enough, and looked at the lips of the person being dubbed over, but as AI continues to get better the line between real and obviously fake is getting harder and harder to decipher.

AI videos now saturate social media, from dancing babies, to rapping grandmothers, to explosions taking down entire buildings, and even sea monsters taking over naval ships...and everything in between.

Well, in a development that will interest both college and high school coaches, we've now reached a point where AI is being used to create highlight videos.

This clip from @DalTuffy is making its way around social media channels showing an AI generated highlight reel, seemingly starting on TikTook before picked up by other accounts on X.

The first clip is a bit hard to tell, but that absolute moon-ball-dime from the quarterback seems to defy physics - a typical tell for AI videos.

The second clip has defenders diving way behind a ball carrier in the type of way that only happens when you're playing a video game against someone that has never held a controller before.

The third and fourth clips have some horrendous missed tackles, bad angles, and lost defenders that look like something out of Madden 04 on Rookie Mode (if the Madden game soundtrack from that game involuntarily started playing in your head after that one - you're a real one).

A closer examination will show players wearing #73 and #57 playing in the secondary, which I suppose is accurate only at the smallest of high school levels.

Then theres the fact that, if this is a highlight for a specific player, each clip seems to show a different player from a different team playing a different offensive position. Another absolutely comical glaring issue is the yard lines. Pay attention if you need a good chuckle.

Overall, at least for the time being, these fakes should be relatively easy to catch for coaches. But as we've seen in other AI areas, these are bound to get better and better, so knowing they're out there is an important first step because this trend is sure to spawn trolls whose entire life goal will be to get a scholarship offer for a kid that doesn't exist off an AI video so they can attempt to publicly humiliate a program or staff.

Take a look below.