One of the most obnoxious traits of the AI slop era is the way any phrase you type into Google is now likely to prompt an AI overview speculating about what a sequence of words means, making up a bunch of stuff whole cloth, and being completely wrong.
Last week while trying to find traces of an internet forum I remembered from my teens, I typed in the site’s slogan—”Grimmest and Most Frostbitten Kvlt of Fool’s Gold”—which Google’s AI overview spun up a completely nonsense answer for: “The grimmest, most frostbitten “kvlt” (cult) of fool’s gold is Iron Pyrite (FeS2).” Google further explained that the “‘Kvlt aspect” was due to fool’s gold being “often considered more valuable than real gold in the fictional universe of Azeroth (World of Warcraft).” Whatever, man.
“You might be saying, ‘Chuck, I didn’t know you had a cat!’ and I’d respond with, ‘I didn’t know I had a cat either,'” wrote the author of Star Wars novels and his own fantasy series’. Wendig bowed to the wisdom of the AI, which he called “totally not a piece of shit that just makes up information willy-fucking-nilly,” and embedded several more search results in which the AI overview explained his cat Boomba had died, and that he had adopted a new cat named Franken. Google cited Wendig’s blog for this information—curious, since a cursory search of the blog reveals he’d never used the words “Boomba” or “Franken” once.
The blog goes on to show that running multiple searches related to the names of his imaginary pets resulted in Google’s AI overview continually making up new names and pets one after another. It also said that he had cancer, and had “embraced Christianity in a public way.”
“This is just a nice little reminder that generative AI is shit,” Wendig wrote. “Total shit! It scrapes everything we’ve ever written and then can’t even sort through it fast enough to give us a correct answer, all the while burning down the world to lie to us. What a truly nightmarish thing we’ve created! Jesus Christ we are cooked!”
Wendig ended the post by referencing his cat “who is named Sir Mewlington Von Pissbreath and who is definitely real and who is six years old and who wears a little top hat and also can speak limited Cantonese.”
Six weeks later, Google’s AI results have incorporated Sir Mewlington into the vast corpus of “facts” it will serve up, incorrectly, as it endeavors to make every search result page untrustworthy.
Good blog, though. Wendig further excoriated AI—specifically about its use in the publishing world—in another post in late December, which is soothing if you appreciate published authors saying things like “I think AI is only inevitable when we believe the lie of its inevitability.” Maybe reading it will make you feel a tiny bit more sane in an insane world.
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