Not surprised. Another example is minecraft related queries. Im searching with the intention of eventually going to a certain wiki page at minecraft.wiki, but started to just read the summaries instead. It will combine fan forums discussing desired features/ideas with the actual game bible at minecraft.wiki - so it mixes one source of truth with one source of fantasy. Results in ridiculous inaccurate summaries.

A few months ago in a comment here on HN I speculated about the reason an old law might have been written the way it was, instead of more generally. If it had been written without the seemingly arbitrary restrictions it included there would have been no need for the new law that the thread was about.

A couple hours later I decided to ask an LLM if it could tell me. It quickly answered, giving the same reason that I had guessed in my HN comment.

I then clicked the two links it cited as sources. One was completely irrelevant. The other was a link to my HN comment.

I had a similar thing happen to me just today. A friend of mine had finished a book in a series. I have read the series but it was almost 10 years ago, and I needed a refresher with spoilers, so I went looking.

Well, some redditor had posted a comparison of a much later book in the series, and drawn all sorts of parallels and foreshadowing and references between this quite early book I was looking for and the much later one. It was an interesting post so it had been very popular.

The AI summary completely confused the two books because of this single reddit post, so the summary I got was hopelessly poisoned with plot points and characters that wouldn't show up until nearly the conclusion. It simply couldn't tell which book was which. It wasn't quite as ridiculous as having, say, Anakin Skywalker face Kylo Ren in a lightsaber duel, but it was definitely along those same lines of confusion.

Fortunately, I finished the later book recently enough to remember it, but it was like reading a fever dream.

I find its tricky with games, especially ones as updated as frequently as Minecraft over the years. I've had some of this trouble with OSRS. It brings in old info, or info from a League/Event that isn't relevant. Easier to just go to the insanely curated wiki.

What's interesting to me is that this kind of behavior -- slightly-buffleheaded synthesis of very large areas of discourse with widely varying levels of reliability/trustworthiness -- is actually sort of one of the best things about AI research, at least for me?

I'm pretty good at reading the original sources. But what I don't have in a lot of cases is a gut that tells me what's available. I'll search for some vague idea (like, "someone must have done this before") with the wrong jargon and unclear explanation. And the AI will... sort of figure it out and point me at a bunch of people talking about exactly the idea I just had.

Now, sometimes they're loons and the idea is wrong, but the search will tell me who the players are, what jargon they're using to talk about it, what the relevant controversies around the ideas are, etc... And I can take it from there. But without the AI it's actually a long road between "I bet this exists" and "Here's someone who did it right already".

Or you can take the alternative approach, where Microsoft's own "Merl" support agent says it knows anything to do with Minecraft, and then replies to basically any gameplay question with "I don't know that".

I run a small business that buys from one of two suppliers of the items we need. The supplier has a TRASH website search feature. It's quicker to Google it.

Now that AI summaries exist, I have to scroll past half a page of result and nonsense about a Turkish oil company before I find the item I'm looking for.

I hate it. It's such a minor inconvenience, but it's just so annoying. Like a sore tooth.