Clankers

As you might imagine, I’m not a particularly big fan of AI, a.k.a. The Plagiarism Machine. AI slop is killing the internet, and also putting artists, writers (like me), and others out of jobs. Corporate bean counters think it’s great that they can get more content out of a machine than a human and not have to pay for it. I suppose that’s true, as long as you don’t care about such content being remotely accurate or factual.

The original purpose of the computer was to automate routine calculations. It seems modern AI can’t even get this fundamental task right. I had a bit too much fun writing this piece for Jalopnik that caught Google AI Overview red-handed giving false information about the length of various vehicles, even when it already had the correct measurements. The 232.6-inch long Ford F-150 Raptor is not shorter than the 221.9-inch Ford Expedition Max, as AI Overview claims. Also, the 225-inch long Chevy Suburban is not longer than the Chevy Silverado, which can be as long as 240 inches in its largest configurations.

Although the numbers it gave were correct, its interpretations were not. Those are the first and often only things that people with short attention spans are going to read, sending them off with the wrong information, even though the correct figures were right there in front of them.

And that is why we need human writers who do at least a little bit of basic fact checking before publishing blatantly wrong information.