Large Language Mistake

So, if you're scouring the internet for archived magazine road tests of a certain car, you can often input the year, make, model, and "0-60". (I have decades of Car and Driver and Road & Track in the attic and just generally lying around the house, but they're hardly organized.)

While searching for information on the 1-of-2400 1977 Oldsmobile Delta 88 Indy 500 Pace Car yesterday, I had Google’s AI summary tell me it didn’t exist and that the '77 pace car was a Corvette. Then this morning, given the same input, Google says it was a Toronado.

Few things encapsulate the current zeitgeist like having the “Artificial Intelligence“ LLM of a tech megacorp confidently tell you that the thing you saw with your own eyes (and photographed!) doesn’t exist, while simultaneously contradicting the different wrong answer it gave you yesterday.

This is like HAL trying to gaslight Dave by telling him that the pod bay doors he’s looking right at don’t exist.

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