I often forget to append “-ai” to the ends of my Google searches. I usually manage to avoid reading the “AI Overview,” but once in a while I do accidentally read it. And I think that every single time I’ve done that, the AI Overview has included at least one false statement.
So I don’t generally bother to post them any more. But once in a while the falsehood is so utterly ridiculous and egregious that I figure it’s worth posting about.
Here’s today’s:
The line “Things would be so different / If they were not as they are!” is from the poem “The Waking” by American poet Theodore Roethke. It is a simple, yet profound statement about the nature of reality and the limitations of hypotheticals.
[…]
In “The Waking,” the full quote appears as a standalone stanza:
“Things would be so different / If they were not as they are!”
The poem, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1954, is a meditation on mortality and the cycles of nature. It often uses paradoxical language, as seen in the line, “I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.” The couplet “Things would be so different / If they were not as they are!” captures this sense of circularity and resignation.
All of which is utterly false.
The line in question is from an Anna Russell piece. It does not appear in the Roethke poem. It does not appear in any of the Roethke pages that Google Gemini links to in support of its claim. The only thing that the line and the Roethke poem have in common is that both date from 1953.
I suppose one could claim that the Russell line is a “simple, yet profound statement about the nature of reality and the limitations of hypotheticals,” but really the line is a tautological joke.
Remember: Don’t trust anything that generative AI tells you.