today in “google AI is fucking useless because it hallucinates things that never happened”, i bought a couple CVS thermometers that have both been acting up, tried to search if there had been a problem with the whole product line:
there is no record of this product recall. it did not happen. the date “feb 8 2024” is the date someone listed a thermometer for sale on ebay.
A friend said he’d seen green lighting, so I went to look it up and
“a rare but common phenomenon” is how Google AI describes it. I don’t know if the rest of the science is accurate because I got so mad it was there I forgot to check.
Here’s the thing: I am not opted into Google AI. I opted out of it when it first popped up months ago. I cannot get rid of it. All of my toggles for anything AI in Chrome are off (do NOT come at me for using Chrome, it has a functionality that I use daily that I cannot find a dupe for in Firefox). I have been trying for two days to get rid of it and I can’t. It’s also on our work computers, which as a librarian, I have to say is frankly insulting because it’s so often WRONG.
I am saying this as an information professional: do not trust the AI results. Scroll past them. Find a reputable website. Wikipedia’s more accurate at this rate, and 99% of the time, the AI just scraped wiki’s results and barfed them back to you with a smattering of contamination from other sites.
