25 Comments
User's avatar
Mark Cromer's avatar

My favorite fact-checker, bullshit-detector and NYT myth-buster strikes again! Ata' girl!

PeteyV's avatar

I live in Silicon Valley, where AI was invented, and I can tell you, from living among the tech people that invented it, that they are idiots. Oh, they're good at writing code, but other than that, they have no common sense or knowledge about anything outside of a motherboard. Everyone is excited about AI, but something that comes from the mind of fools is not going to be "smarter than a human", or anything like that. My friend who had her own hedge fund told me, "AI is the next big thing that a lot of people are going to lose a lot of money on." Bet on it.

Dan Sargis's avatar

But… AI has the potential to be a huge benefit to people. For instance, if I want to know what the average 30 year home mortgage rate was, I could either spend half a day going through government databases or I could just ask AI and get the answer in two seconds which, if you’re curious, is about 7 1/2% so I don’t know why people are crying about the cost of mortgages when they should be in a lather about the the unaffordability of municipal property taxes to support people who mostly do nothing.

Michael's avatar
1dEdited

I just ran this query through 3 different AI platforms (openai or chatgpt, claude and google). The first 2 gave me correct answers and chatgpt gave me the most complete answer. Google gave me the same BS response that Ann received and I called it on it. It profusely appologized for it's mistake and then gave me an acceptable answer. I use chatgpt for quite a bit of research so it's got quite a bit more training from me on accuracy of answers and not to guess.

PuPu Platter's avatar

I'm paying so I might as well make all three of our days.

I asked my AI to find me the top ten publications of a certain type in a certain field. Let's say "newsletters" on "knitting."

Sure enough, it returned 10 answers, whereupon I asked for editors' or managers' email addresses.

Before I realized it might not be able to find editors for all 10, and what the AI needed to do about that likelihood, it returned the names of 10 editors.

All newsletter and editor URLs were made up. The silly thing found companies that had something -- anything -- to do with knitting, added "newsletter" and some other gibberish, and served it up. For the editors they alternated "editor" and "manager" and appended, with the obligatory "@," that word to the fake newsletter name.

When I yelled it said it can't search the Web but it wanted to please me.

And for this they're building 600 data centers in Texas alone?

Michael Zilkowsky's avatar

you should look up something for dreidel or shyster or 'my heritage'

Charles Casaburi's avatar

What exactly is NATO defending against compared to its current leadership Putin would be a vast improvement. He would never allow Europe to be invaded by religious fanatics out of the dark ages or primitive Africans who had no written language before they were colonized in the 19th century

Jonathan Leaf's avatar

A few months ago I asked Microsoft AI (Bing) if Pope Leo smoked cigarettes. It told me that there was no Pope Leo.

Dan Sargis's avatar

So is that really Elvis who’s all dressed up with the velvet slippers throwing shade at Trump from the Vatican?

Erik's avatar

😂 it just never ends….we have to be so discerning now

ktrip's avatar

How many times do we get this from Ai- like a child trying to hide something from its parents. "Let's see if they'll buy this." "Oh, you mean that NY Times, I thought you meant the other- yeah they never covered it." Too often it is just pulling any old crap off the internet or worse. That's how you get legal pleadings that cite "The Jacobin" as an authoritative legal source. Some idiot is asking Ai to get it support for some nonsense claim. This is terrible but it will be worse when fewer and fewer people know enough to call BS.

Helios Megistos's avatar

Google delenda est!

Carl Strain's avatar

Ann, and audience, Google AI is no different than Chat GPT, I get wrong, I mean 180 degree wrong, answers from Chat GPT, and I confront Chat and it confesses its error. Other times, Chat give me what seems like accurate and thorough answers.

Point: what you experienced in what you call a Google AI FAIL is at Chat GPT also.

Mona Mistric's avatar

Gotta love it! NOT!

Chazyb's avatar

I asked Alexa if John Wilkes Booth was a Marxist and it said no. Then it followed up with some gibberish and asked for my name. I thought that was weird.

Molly Putnam's avatar

Rod Dreher’s substack is great for unpublished stories in the US Press.

Tom's avatar

And this is supposed to replace all the jobs on Earth ?

Sal Durante's avatar

I rely on GROK:

No, The New York Times has not reported on the case of Päivi Räsänen.Extensive searches across web results (including targeted queries with site:nytimes.com) turn up no articles from The New York Times on her legal proceedings. Other major outlets have covered it, including:AP News (on the 2022 acquittal)

The Washington Post (editorial criticizing the 2026 Supreme Court conviction)

Finnish media (Yle, Helsinki Times)

International outlets focused on religious liberty and free speech

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