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Thread of AI Overview fun:

Harsh but accurate

I just wanted to know if I was too old to get a cushy fascism job, ended up researching glaciers

Go ahead, define Wes Anderson without saying Wes Anderson. I’ll wait

This is the sort of thing an actually useful AI would actually be useful for

This is mostly accurate except it doesn’t get the pun but just swaps in the misspelled word. Plus it cites as a source the band that made this record:

I wish we were going to Candy Apple Planet

Just retried this and got a totally different fabrication. In fact “Monday pop,” which I Googled after coming across it in a text from the 1800s, referred to the “Monday Popular Concerts” as was clear from the context (en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Dicti...)

Subthread

Wow, I’ll be impressed if they can pull this off

I was looking for a video of The State’s sketch about the guy who discovers the word “and” and... this AI Overview neither describes that sketch nor the linked www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5Kz..., which is indeed “a ridiculous, disjointed live broadcast” but not based on the word “and” at all

Hmm! How did this informal slang usage come about, I wonder? Why is it considered rude? [This was not in fact an attempt to search for “bs” but a botched URL autocomplete of “bsky.app”]

As co-author of Thackray’s biography, it’s fascinating and worrying to see how much AI has got wrong here because it is regurgitating misinformation from the internet. It’s no substitute for real research. 🧐 Heaven help us if the world is becoming more reliant on AI.

In this case I didn’t even see a source page that makes the claim—it seems to be fabricating it based on pages that reference both songs e.g. jakethackray.com/forums/topic... (“It is quite certain that Jake knew « Le Fossoyeur » ( published in 1952 ) when he wrote his own « The Gravedigger ».”)