Sorry for the long story, here.
Yesterday, I fixed the washing machine. (Long story. Turned out to be the clutch, which is more of a pain to fix – requires more disassembly – than most other common fixes.) During the process, I jostled it and something metal fell out. A cotter pin sort of thing.
My mother checked on me while I was working on it and I mentioned the piece that fell out. She went and started researching about it. (Not something I asked her to do. I would have done the research myself had she not done so. But it didn’t hurt anything to have her research. Or so I thought.)
She comes back 10 minutes later and says “this thing is a super important piece that holds something together somewhere. Better figure out where it fell out of.” I looked her in the eye, knowing her penchant for reading Google AI overviews and asked “is that from the AI overview?” “No” came the answer. “Oh, some random forum or something?” “Yeah.”
She leaves, I go back to the washing machine. (There was plenty I could still do even without an answer to the mystery of the random piece falling out.)
10 minutes after that she hollers from the other room. “Nevermind. It’s packing material that isn’t needed after the washing machine is installed.” She’d found Reddit post where someone had a similar experience with the same exact kind of part falling out of their washer of a very similar model. Mind you, my washing machine is decades old, so I’m a little surprised it would still have parts that were only for packing/shipping, but whatever. Not really implausible at all.
Fast forward to today. She’s telling me how she told her friend about the mystery part, and she let slip that “when she checked the references” she found on Reddit that it was a useless piece contrary to what it said first.
“References.”
Random forum posts don’t have “references.” Google’s AI overview pretends it can give you “references” telling you where it got the “knowledge” it used to generate an answer. (But it’s bad about misinterpreting references, and I have to imagine when it provides references, those are complete guesses. Everything I’ve heard is that “knowing” where it got the information that went into whatever answer it generated just isn’t how LLMs work.)
I brought up that she’d told me the first thing she saw that said it was super important wasn’t an AI overview. And she admitted it had been.
And, honestly, I find it hard to describe how absolutely livid I am about it. I’ve asked her many times not to parrot AI overviews to me. (Whatever she wants to put in her brain is no business of mine, but I don’t want her polluting my brain with that bullshit.) She regularly ignores my wishes and continues to read me AI overviews. It pisses me off, but I’ve learned to swallow it.
But I can’t express just how huge a betrayal it feels like to be told AI bullshit and then lied to about whether it was AI bullshit. I’m a lot calmer about it than I was at first, but an hour ago, I was shaking.
I was very calm with her about it, though I’m sure my face was super red. I asked her pointedly not to lie to me about where she gets her information, but I don’t expect any change in her behavior moving forward. 😐
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Solution is to never listen to your mother again. She had lost all credibility.
Next time she speaks, tell her to shut up. Remind her of all the times she’s spoken nonsense.
If she won’t shut up, put your fingers in your ears and say “no ai slop. no ai slop.” over and over. Until she leaves.
Not to diminish your frustration, but the scary thing about this is that it’s happening in the workplace by professionals on a daily basis now. People have absolutely just surrendered all of their thinking abilities. What an absurd world. I wish I could be more certain about the bubble bursting, but we may have to live with the AI overview zombies for a while.
“This thing is specifically like this”
“Hm. Google says it’s like that”
“Is that the AI overview?”
Wonder how much productivity loss is represented by the thousands of times that conversation has happened
But I can’t express just how huge a betrayal it feels like to be told AI bullshit and then lied to about whether it was AI bullshit.
Couldn’t agree more. Though in her defence (and the defence of every person who has done the exact same thing to me for being AS-wary just like you), I don’t think lying about it is done in order to spite or anger. My personal, very unorthodox theory is that, at the end of the day, people do feel stupid/useless being constantly told every piece of mundane information by the AS, so they lie about it.
Just start assuming anything she says to you is useless drivel until she shows you proof. Her choice to be careless with her word has natural consequences.
This is good. Lying has consequences. Showing her she can’t be trusted is a good consequence.
Whatever she says now, “Prove it.”
FUUUUUCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK THE GIPITY
I routinely say to people around me “don’t use the lie machine”.
I need to change one of their search engines to be noai on duck duck go
Man, thats really fucking frustrating, I’m really sorry 🫂
Dishonesty is always really corrosive in relationships and it is especially so when it’s about things that are important to you
Yup, I know that frustration. No amount of explaining gets through.
Mom may not have meant bad but this is textbook definition of gaslighting
I don’t wanna be needlessly argumentative, but no it isn’t. This is just lying, not all lies are gaslighting. Gaslighting is lying with the specific intent of making someone question their perception of reality.
Intend or not the outcome is exactly that.
Op perceived the reality that mom was parroting ai.
Mom pretended like that reality was not real and they where wrong to perceive it that way.
