Lies AI Overview Told Me

 

 

Ah, yes, surely this AI Overview summation of the Internet’s information about US presidents who attended UW-Madison must be correct! As supernatural beings, former presidents often rise from the dead to add a university degree to their resumes, you know. . .

Twenty years ago, college instructors would sternly warn students not to cite, or even look at, Wikipedia. Since entries were written by ordinary human volunteers, these instructors admonished that they would likely contain both foolish errors and misinformation. 

 

Today we can see that Wikipedia is one of the most trustworthy sources of information on the internet, precisely because it is written, and more importantly constantly reviewed, moderated, and revised by actual people—people invested in the pursuit of truth and knowledge. 

 

Along comes Google, diligently pursuing profits via “enshittification” (Not my term but one you should know!). Google knows users are unhappy at how their search result quality has gone down, now consisting largely of links to AI-generated product review lists, paid promotions, and annoying clickbait. So it responds by saying, in essence, “Don’t worry about having to wade through all that junk! We bring you an AI that will summarize the entire wisdom of the Internet pertaining to your question, something beyond the capacities of mere humans, so you never need even leave our homepage!”

 

Friends, there are very cool things about AI, but many being thrown into the ring now are half-baked, and even the more reliable ones continue to regularly make mistakes, and to just make things up on the fly. I can live with that when I choose to use them carefully, checking their assertions! But that’s not what happens when big tech companies from Google to Apple foist them on users, supposedly to better our experiences, but with their main goal being to harvest ever more of our information and to glue as much of our eyeball time as possible to their particular platform or app. And if that means making it ever harder to separate fact from fiction in an era in which there’s a whole ecosystem of “influencers” (profiteers and narcissists) seeking to create alternate realities that please their conspiracist fanbases, while agents of rival nations seek to paralyze the nation via political division fanned by disinformation. . . oh well! 

 

The duty of a corporation is understood under American corporate law to be to maximize shareholder profits by any legal means necessary, not to pursue the public good. If people think something they are doing harms the public good, they can try to get Congress to pass a law against it. Of course, the corporations will lobby against passing that law, and if it does pass, corporate lawyers will fight it in court. Again, that is framed as their duty in the name of the sacred goal of maximizing shareholder earnings. Enshittification is not a bad thing, it is the proper outcome of a process by which a corporation has through its hard work created a resource, and now extracts its value! Platforms were never created as charities to benefit their users, and users who squawk when what was cheap, convenient, and useful to them becomes expensive, annoying, and dysfunctional are freeloaders who were mooching off of free samples that they foolishly dreamed they could get forever. If they believed the sanctimonious tripe in platform vision statements about the the company's mission being to empower users, and fantasized that a platform existed to serve the user base instead of its shareholders, that's like believing in Santa Claus.

And so here we are, having the Google search engine that is the landing page for many millions of people, many of whom think of it as "the internet," authoritatively spewing nonsense at us. AI Overview suggests getting cheese to stick to pizza by mixing the sauce with glue before baking. It suggested eating a rock a day to get enough minerals. It identified Barack Obama as America's first Muslim president, which aligns with Islamophobic conspiracy claims but not the reality of Obama's Christianity. It gets math problems and conversions wrong frequently. And if you thought AI Overview's claim of dead presidents getting degrees at UW-Madison was weird, another query returned its assertion that every single president other than George H.W. Bush attended Texas A&M. Aha, maybe that is why nobody ever nominated me!