A Sociological Eye

Let's see where we went in the space of a week! Last Sunday, Elon Musk fumed on X about his xAI chatbot, Grok, treating the BBC and The Atlantic as reputable information sources. Musk declared it "embarrassing" and wrong for the AI to trust such media. On Tuesday, as the first white South Africans were arriving in the US as refugees, Musk was posting on X about terrible "white genocide" taking place in South Africa. People asked Grok to fact-check this claim that genocide was being committed against the white Afrikaners who had imposed apartheid. Grok debunked the claim as untrue, and this got a lot of attention on social media and in the news. Then on Wednesday, Grok suddenly stopped giving many people sensible answers to questions they asked it, and suddenly started relating everything to an assertion that there was a genocide being perpetrated against white people in South Africa. People asking about dog memes, about baseball stats, about video games, abo...

    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 ...