Per the above screenshot, if I currently ask Google what “stigmatic ambient music” is, the top link (on the right) listed as a source is a previous blog post of my own, from April 28. In that post, I detailed the absurdity of the idea of this non-genre, which Google’s AI mechanically divined gibberish to justify the existence of when I first inquired. Its broad-strokes response registered like a student who hadn’t studied for finals, let alone read a book all semester.
What is now even more remarkable to me is that the AI actively interprets my negative as a generally applicable positive — a statement documenting certain falsehood becomes, simply due to its presence on the internet, evidence of truth.
When I wrote that original post back in April, there were literally zero search results for “stigmatic ambient music” (with the quotation marks around it) on Google, which was the point of my initial experiment. As of this moment, a little over a month later, Google only returns four (yes, four) non-redundant results in the search return. There will now, as of this follow-up blog post, be a fifth result, and yet Google will likely persist in providing an encyclopedia-like description of something that doesn’t exist — caveat usor, and all that.