Ain’t nothing like the real thing: Officials warn against using AI for hunting regs

There is at least one thing artificial intelligence is not ready to replace.

The humble hunting regulation booklet.

Earlier this month, the Idaho Department of Fish and Game issued a warning to hunters that they should not rely on AI to interpret the state’s hunting and fishing regulations, and that game wardens had encountered people in the field who had been fed the wrong information by AI.

Roger Phillips, a spokesperson for Idaho Fish and Game, said Friday that the incident that pushed the agency to issue a warning came in southeast Idaho, where a waterfowl hunter was caught hunting a day early.

When confronted by wardens, the hunter said he had gotten the opening date from an online search.

Phillips said wardens found that the search gave him an AI answer that pulled information from a failed proposal, not the agency’s final decision or its regulations book.

That got Idaho Fish and Game staff interested in what else AI had wrong. They found a handful of examples where the robots fell short. Among them: A search for rules on a specific river in Idaho turned up results for a river with a similar name in Arkansas.

Therein lies the problem, Phillips said.

No matter the parameters of the search, you cannot always trust that AI will pick the right source from the infinite options available in cyberspace.

“It casts a really wide net,” he said.

Wildlife officials in other states have also noticed AI problems. Officials in places like Illinois and Maine have warned people against using AI to answer questions about hunting rules.

Just this week, the Wyoming Game and Fish Department this week said in a news release that the agency has been alerted to “a number of inaccurate AI-generated search results.”

Several of the errors stemmed from failed bills listed on the Wyoming State Legislature’s website, according to the release. Search results created by AI referenced some failed bills as if they had passed and become law.

Aaron Kerr, Wyoming Game and Fish’s law enforcement supervisor, said in the release that relying on bad information does not absolve anyone from the consequences of violating hunting or fishing regulations.

“Hunters and anglers are accountable for following published rules and regulations,” Kerr said. “Failure to follow these carries the potential for fines, jail time, or suspension of hunting and fishing privileges.”

Alan Myers, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife’s police captain for Eastern Washington, said he has not heard of any cases of violations involving AI interpretations of Washington’s hunting regulations.

The internet’s stockpile of misinformation predates the rise of AI, though. Myers said there have been cases in the past where a hunter or angler’s defense for a violation was a bad search result or something they’d read on social media.

Phillips blames all of this on the human urge to solve any problem with a Google search.

“When I want to know if a restaurant is about to close, I just Google it,” Phillips said. “We get in the habit of doing these things, and then when we go hunting and fishing we might carry those habits with us.”

Google introduced its AI tool in 2024 and began offering AI-generated overviews in response to many searches. The overviews offer quick answers, but not always the right ones, and not always with the sort of granular detail embedded in hunting and fishing rules.

“When you have a 125-page big game regs booklet that covers controlled hunts and general hunts and archery seasons and muzzleloader seasons and rifle seasons,” Phillips said, “you could see where that would overwhelm AI pretty quickly.”

There is at least one AI tool meant to help people navigate the complexities of hunting regulations.

Called Scout, the tool was created by the International Hunter Education Association. It launched last year, and it lets people ask a chatbot specific questions about hunting rules and regulations in a particular state.

Users pick a state from a dropdown menu and then ask their question. The bot combs rulebooks for a given state, and then gives an answer. The answer also cites the pages the information came from. The booklet itself appears in a PDF viewer below the answer, and the site also lets users download PDFs for any state.

Getting people to use the official source is the only solution. Even the sometimes-faulty AI search results usually include a disclaimer urging people to consult regulation booklets.

No one booklet covers everything a hunter or angler needs to know. Separate publications are created each year for fishing, big game, migratory birds, turkeys and more.

They are free, though, and easy to find online and in real life.

“Any place where licenses and tags are sold,” Phillips said.