A Sociological Eye

    Would you like to read some of the interesting books suggested by Chicago Sun-Times for your summer vacation? Well, it's most likely you can't. That's because only 5 of the 15 suggestions are actual books! The rest are the hallucinations of whatever AI chatbot the editors prompted to produce the list. The authors are real. But the books are not. One of the fabrications, by the way, is titled, "The Last Algorithm." Just a little bonus irony! Apparently the newspaper was sold in a buyout agreement that involved firing 20% of the staff. The current hotness in the world of CEOs is the belief that the moment has come when they can shed a lot of white-collar workers and replace them with "nearly-free" AI LLM chatbots, just as years earlier they fired blue-collar workers and replaced them with robots. AI tools are remarkable--don't get me wrong--but they are also unreliable, because AIs lack both judgment and understanding of what they're doing. Ch...

    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 ...