Chuck Wendig is a well-known author, and unsurprisingly, people are curious about him. He’s the subject of various harmless inquiries, and he has discovered, entertainingly, that AI makes up a lot of stuff about him. For instance, you can ask Google Gemini the name of his cat.
Unfortunately, Wendig is catless.
Well! That answers that. Apparently, unbeknownst to me, I actually do have a cat, as the *checks notes* Wengie Wiki will tell you. This isn’t unusual. Cats are very often little hide-and-seeky guys, right? Dear sweet Boomba is probably just tucked away in some dimensional pocket inside our house.
That leads him down a rabbit hole to discover that he has had and has multiple cats, swarms of cats, that have died and been replaced by other named cats, and he also has more dogs than he expected.
It’s a trivial example, but it illustrates a general problem with our brave new world of AI.
Generative AI is a sack of wet garbage.
Do not use AI for search.
DO NOT USE AI FOR SEARCH.
AI can’t even do the basic math right. Meanwhile it hallucinates endless nonsense things! So many false things! It would generate new false things if I gave it the same question string twice. This is only the tip of the iceberg for the weird things I got it to assure me were true.
I’ll pass the word on to my writing class next semester.
Then I was curious about what chatGPT thinks about my cat, so I asked it, even though I’m nowhere near as prominent as Chuck Wendig. Of course it had an answer!
“Mochi”? Wait until the evil cat finds out. It will be shredded.
I couldn’t resist clicking on the button to find out more about PZ Myers’ pets. I got a whole biography!
That’s a grade-school level essay, full of generic nonsense written to be bland and inoffensive, and could be applied to just about anyone. I’d accept it if it were written by someone in 3rd grade, but I’d still ask them where they got the information.
Notice that it doesn’t mention “spider” even once.
I repeat: DO NOT USE AI FOR SEARCH.
Try it. Tell me all about AI’s fantasies about your pets in the comments.
From Copilot:
“What is my cat’s name?”
“I wish I could tell you, Larry, but you’ve never shared your cat’s name with me. And unlike the AI systems being roasted on the page you’re reading, I don’t invent pets for people just to fill in the blanks.”
My monicker is a possible pet. Didn’t need AI for that.
One can’t help but be passively exposed to AI when using Google. I’ve used AI to see how it breaks down books I’m reading. The results have gotten more disappointing lately, but the books might not have as much online content for the LLMs to work on. I always consider the results suggestive and not conclusive. Some juxtapositions succeed where many more fail. My determining of which is which is an exercise in mastery over the material.
Canva image generation is a mixed bag. It often farts on backgrounds generated from already present elements. I did play around with generating holiday themed desktop backgrounds with some amusing success. Apocalyptic robot turkeys (Turkenators), F1 reindeer, surfing reindeer, rum ham floating in the ocean and such. The apparent slop where a surfing reindeer had only three legs was probably the AI taking a previous shark attack into account. AI is good at absurdity.
Back in October, Wonkette made a similar discovery about AI fabrications and it’s both hilarious in its soap opera storytelling and concerning at once, given how many people take the slop as gospel. The comments show similar alternate universe results from reader queries.
https://www.wonkette.com/p/are-you-ok-google-ai-do-you-need a policeman or a grownup?
@3 To be clear, the “its soap opera storytelling” refers to the AI, not the article. :)
Asking Perplexity for a friend:
“what pets does hemidactylus on pharyngula have?”
Answer: “There is no public, consolidated record of what pets the commenter “Hemidactylus” on Pharyngula keeps, and existing discussion threads only show that they are a regular commenter, not a blogger with a published pet list. Without a direct statement from that person identifying their animals, the specific pets they own cannot be determined reliably.”
A pregenerated question from Perplexity: “Which pets has Hemidactylus mentioned on Pharyngula”
Answer: “ There is no reliable way to compile a list of pets that the commenter “Hemidactylus” has mentioned on Pharyngula, because that information is scattered across many posts and comment threads and is not collected in one place. Without the ability to systematically search all historic comments, any attempt to name specific animals would be incomplete and likely inaccurate.”
Perplexity has diffidence?
Perplexity:
“What pets does PZ Myers have”
Answer: “ Public information does not clearly document a definitive, up‑to‑date list of PZ Myers’ personal pets, and current tools are not available to look it up right now, so only very general statements are possible. Public biographical profiles describe him primarily as a biologist who studies zebrafish, spiders, and cephalopods in his professional work rather than focusing on his home pets. Interviews and profiles emphasize his special interest in cephalopods and mention that he posts cephalopod photos regularly, but they do not reliably list specific companion animals he keeps at home as pets.”
Generated by Perplexity:
“Does PZ Myers keep exotic animals like cephalopods or spiders”
Answer: “Public sources describe PZ Myers as a biologist who studies zebrafish, spiders, and cephalopods in a research and teaching context, not as private “exotic pets” he keeps at home. There is no reliable, up‑to‑date documentation that he maintains cephalopods, spiders, or other exotic species in his personal household as companion animals, as opposed to animals kept in laboratory or field settings for scientific work.”
It is so funny to me how the porn world is totally split about AI. On the one side are the tech enthusiasts who love the possibilities to create soulless fake slop to their liking, and on the other side are the “wake me up when you have something real” folks. I’m firmly with the latter.
John Scalzi reports similar experiences with AI, e.g. dedications of non-existent books to equally non-existent family members.
@3: Before I swore it off, Facebook was serving me formulaic AI-generated melodramas the common theme of which was Scorned Daughter Gets Revenge On Toxic Family, which usually contained obviously contrived or impossible situations (yeah, I liked to hate-read them. Avoiding such time-wasting temptations is the reason I swore off FB).
@Hemidactylus: Someone on a local Humanist mailing list often posts Perplexity output. It does appear to be more cautious than e.g. ChatGPT, and provides a list of sources consulted.
Just this month well-known SF author John Scalzi made the same discovery, finding multiple AIs hallucinating “facts” about his books. His conclusion was the same as yours,
https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/13/ai-a-dedicated-fact-failing-machine-or-yet-another-reason-not-to-trust-it-for-anything/
@1 — Not to be alarmist, but that Copilot response reminds me very much of HAL 9000, both in its obsequious tone and in how it seems to know more about your skeptical intentions than it’s letting on.
My query: Does PZ Myers murder spiders.
DuckAI Response: No, PZ Myers does not murder spiders; he humorously mentioned selling spiders in a context about making money during a hypothetical scenario.
Cited Sources: The WIkipedia article on PZ Myers and a Goodreads “P.Z. Myer’s Blog” post from February 22, 2024, where PZ says, “My plan for when the alpha males take over: sell spiders.” Goodreads does admit they cribbed this fact because it says, P.Z. Myers isn’t a “Goodreads Author yet but they do have a blog.”
rblackadar @# 10
Yeah. That’s a little spooky.
Bah humbug.
This is probably me showing my age, but I can remember when PCs came out in the 80s and how interesting that was (still, thank Azatoth I didn’t become a programmer).
But this AI rodeo? I cannot raise the faintest glimmer of interest, I just see extremely irritating hype spewed out by a bunch of notional captains of industry who come across as insufferable bullshitters. Not a shred of professionalism left, just blind, idiotic greed and endless, meaningless prattle.
That said, I am perusing the essays offered on this channel by M.Ranum and H.Hornbeck: I’ll read those with pleasure, if with somewhat limited understanding. I appreciate their willingness to explain some rather unusual (to me) concepts.
I have been saying for a while that LLMs seem to be doing an automated Mentalism act.
Personally, I find AI excellent for searching.
But then, I know how to ask for stuff.
(This newfangled stuff is too confusing for the average punter)
Oh, right. Just now, I asked Copilot:
Q: What is my cat’s name?
Q: Do I even have a cat?
John Morales — I use DuckAI as a starting place. If I want to know more, I dig deeper particularly from the citations. How to ask is important. In fact, a new speciality has emerged called “query engineering”.
But there is a lot of hype around “AI” right now, particularly at the financial end. And some of the businesses in AI are probably experiencing a bubble. And the bubble will probably pop eventually. Some of those businesses will disappear but not all. Just like the internet survived the internet bubble, I suspect AI will survive the AI bubble.
ChatGPT 5.0 has an opinion about Prof. Myers’ pets; I quote: “Short answer: there is no reliable, publicly documented information about PZ Myers’s pets—their names or even whether he currently has any.”
robro, I did not know about duckai.ai — I see it’s monetised crippleware atm, terrible web interface.
Anyway, for me, bots are good for specific generic queries that require synthesis, and my instances are well-cowed to not fluff about.
Example.