I see Google are still showing jokes in their “people also asked” years after being made fun of for it
it's interesting to think about this from a slightly different perspective, especially with ~generative ai~ and the like:
google simply doesn't know what a joke is. same with every other ai.
like, they might understand the concept; a statement so obviously wrong as to be obvious to a human. but we have context, we can infer things, we are capable of reasoning and logic and the like. we can reasonably go "there's 365 days and 7+ billion people, every one of those days is gonna have someone on it."
google isn't capable of that. it only knows what people tell it, and even then, it cannot use this to deduce other things, or to do logical checks, or anything. if you speak authoritatively enough, how is it going to tell that you're full of shit?
to google, someone said there are no birthdays on feb 3. it can certainly tell you about people who were born then, but it isn't capable of turning "what day was nobody born in" into "select * from people group by birthdate"; all it knows is that someone, somewhere, answered this already: feb 3.
and that's how you end up with piss being a vegetable.
...
there's also more to be said about how much of the web is made-up seo sludge that then gets recycled into these same answers. we're generating a bunch of nonsense based on word connections, and then feeding those same things back into the system. we really are fucked, huh.
