Google AI Overview made up an elaborate story about me

I really hope this stays up, despite the politics involvement to a degree. I think this is a situation that is a perfect example of how AI hallucinations/lack of accuracy could significantly impact our lives going forward. A very nuanced and serious topic with lots of back and forth being distilled down to headlines by any source, it is a terrifying reality. Especially if we aren't able to communicate how these tools work to the public. (if they even will care to learn it) At least when humans did this they knew at some level at least they skimmed the information on the person/topic.

I've had multiple people copy and paste AI conversations and results in GitHub issues, emails, etc., and there are I think a growing number of people who blindly trust the results of any of these models... including the 'results summary' posted at the top of Google search results.

Almost every summary I have read through contains at least one glaring mistake, but if it's something I know nothing about, I could see how easy it would be to just trust it, since 95% of it seems true/accurate.

Trust, but verify is all the more relevant today. Except I would discount the trust, even.

prompt> use javascript to convert a unix timestamp to a date in 'YYYY-MM-DD' format using Temporal

answer> Temporal.Instant.fromEpochSeconds(timestamp).toPlainDate()

Trust but verify?

I mean... Yes? That looks correct to me°, but it's been a minute since I worked with Temporal, so I'd run it myself and examine the output before I cut and paste.

Or have I missed your point?

---

°Missing a TZ assertion, but I don't remember what happens by default. Zulu time? I'd hope so, but that reinforces my point.

I would also read the documentation. In the given example, for example, you don't know if the desired fixed format "YYYY-MM-DD" might depend on some locale setting and only works because you happen to have the correct one in that test console.

Part of my point is this: If you have to read through the docs to see if the answer can be trusted, why didn't you just read the docs to begin with instead of asking the AI?

It's just dawned on me that one possible reason is that you don't know which docs to read. I've recently been forced into learning some JavaScript. Given the original question I wouldn't have known where to start. Now the AI has given me a bunch of things I can look at to see if it's the right thing