FunkyMonk
Jeff JarvisI smell AI
Kirsten Millar@jeffjarvis yuck
@jeffjarvis From the AP? Can we trust nothing now?
schuelermine@twitloyalist @jeffjarvis the summary is probably not from the AP, but some other software which passess this summary off as AP
Matthew Newell@anselmschueler @twitloyalist @jeffjarvis
AP got it right as you suggest but an AI news recycler screwed up
"The largely French-speaking province of Quebec held referendums in 1980 and 1995 over separation. Both failed.". From actual AP story
@anselmschueler @twitloyalist
I asked. The text in those Showcase boxes comes from the publisher, only the publisher.
I asked. The text in those Showcase boxes comes from the publisher, only the publisher.
@jeffjarvis @twitloyalist That is unfortunate, but I hope it’s not AI. Humans can make mistakes.
@jeffjarvis @twitloyalist What platform/software is this?
yetzt@twitloyalist @jeffjarvis Artificial Press.
Lyle Solla-Yates@jeffjarvis 🎶 You can caaaall meeee AI 🎶
@Lyle @jeffjarvis I can call you Betty, and Betty when you call me you can caaaall me ouuut, call me Al.
@jeffjarvis Second take: I think of Alberta as the British Columbia of northern Quebec
Andrew Leahey@jeffjarvis A “province of contrasts,” if you will.
JZehcuob@jeffjarvis AI I smell too...
John Quentin Heywood
Robin Barton@jeffjarvis As a Canadian I am surprised especially as I live in one of the other provinces that speaks French; Quebec
the buff who fell to earth@jeffjarvis I was wondering why my American inlaws told us Alberta had previously had referendums to separate, even though I've lived here over 40 years and have never heard of such a thing.
Kid Mania@jeffjarvis
🤦♂️
jfc
I'm so sick of this fucking timeline. Fuck.
"Nonexistence never hurt anyone. Existence hurts everyone."
- Thomas Ligotti
Johan Sköld@jeffjarvis Is that actually AP or a news aggregator? The card style and the follow button make me think it's the latter.
@rhoot
It's what the AP provides to Google News
It's what the AP provides to Google News
Stefan Habel@jeffjarvis @rhoot The source article contains the following sentence:
“The largely French-speaking province of Quebec held referendums in 1980 and 1995 over separation. Both failed.”
It is likely that Google’s automated summary mixed that up to mean Alberta.
https://apnews.com/article/canada-alberta-referendum-separation-b3da116c6800347f82da5011ee29f8f3
“The largely French-speaking province of Quebec held referendums in 1980 and 1995 over separation. Both failed.”
It is likely that Google’s automated summary mixed that up to mean Alberta.
https://apnews.com/article/canada-alberta-referendum-separation-b3da116c6800347f82da5011ee29f8f3
Alberta's premier proposes referendum on separation from Canada
The premier of Alberta says she will hold a referendum next year on the energy rich province separating from Canada if citizens gather the required number of signatures on a petition. Speaking on a livestream address, Danielle Smith said she personally does not support the province leaving Canada and expressed hope of a “path forward” for a strong and sovereign Alberta within a united Canada. Smith’s announcement comes just one week after Prime Minister Mark Carney led the Liberal Party to a fourth consecutive federal government. It also comes as U.S. President Donald Trump continues to threaten Canada with tariffs and talk of the country becoming the 51st state.
@StefanHabel @jeffjarvis I too suspect it's Google's AI summarizing the article.
@StefanHabel @jeffjarvis in fact, it looks an awful lot like the AI generated page summary feature they added to the Google app in 2023. It doesn't take much imagination to envision them using that on all news articles two years later, in a time when they are aggressively pushing their AI.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/15/23833045/google-artificial-intelligence-summary-chrome-sge
https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/15/23833045/google-artificial-intelligence-summary-chrome-sge
Google Chrome will summarize entire articles for you with built-in generative AI
Google’s latest generative AI tool is an experiment in Chrome called “SGE while browsing” that uses generative AI to create summaries and lists of key points in articles as you read, available starting today in Android and iOS.
@rhoot @jeffjarvis yeah… in light of this, it is wrong to state that it is AP who said Alberta is a province of Quebec, which is what the alt text of the screenshot attached to the original post suggests
Leen Kievit@StefanHabel @jeffjarvis @rhoot Looks like the AI took 'the largely French-speaking province' to refer back to something already mentioned and chose 'Alberta' as the referent, causing the wrong interpretation. But this text will be picked up by other AIs and become TRUTH.
David Nash@StefanHabel @jeffjarvis @rhoot Eh-yup. That’s almost certainly what happened.
Google Gemini is capable of pulling text from other web sites, which leads all sorts of people to say “it’s a search engine! It doesn’t just process your prompt, it also goes out and finds related information on the web!”
Except it runs all that related online information through the same damned fact mangler that your initial request goes through.
I’ll have to rummage around my collection of LLM fails for the details, but there was one time recently I asked Gemini an astronomy question, and it linked to a Wikipedia page stating (correctly) that Barnard’s Star is about 150 times more massive than the planet Jupiter. Gemini mangled that into Barnard’s Star being 150 times *brighter* than Jupiter.
@StefanHabel @rhoot
No. I did the reporting. The text in those Showcase boxes comes from the publisher, only the publisher.
No. I did the reporting. The text in those Showcase boxes comes from the publisher, only the publisher.
ChancerubbageOr what Google News massages it into, don’t you think?
Filip@jeffjarvis Recently, I read an article that had an AI prompt as its first paragraph. I mean, if I wanted to read AI generated text, I could've asked ChatGPT myself...
Is this the AP themselves, or some AI aggregator scraping them?
If Reuters or the AP jump on this bandwagon directly, they might as well call it quits.
Dave Bartkowiak@jeffjarvis ah yes, the Albertacois
EMC2
🛠 Ba Dang 🌺
Paul Turnbull has moved.🇨🇦@jeffjarvis There is more French in Alberta than people realize but not quite that much... :D
Aurani Casts Fireball@jeffjarvis so if they leave Canada... Will they still be a part of Quebec?
What does Montreal have to say about this?
Trev 
@jeffjarvis non, it is ze Bloc Redneckqois
enthraxxx
NoBorg@jeffjarvis
Time to start sharing them all the different groups in different social media of people wanting to rejoin the EU after Brexit.
They realized they were manipulated and they regret it so much.
Time to start sharing them all the different groups in different social media of people wanting to rejoin the EU after Brexit.
They realized they were manipulated and they regret it so much.
Three plus or minus five
sheislaurence@jeffjarvis that's great news! When Québec exits to join the EU, you will need a corridor to its eastern part, either cross 3 or 5 provinces dependent on the route, so that all those in the middle may want to join too. #Canada, the 28th #EU country (to be fair, you already joined the European Defense conversation and now negotiating shared tariffs, it's only just a small extension).
PS: Mexico welcome!
PS: Mexico welcome!
Marion Donnelly@jeffjarvis I just read the story on AP’s site and it looks nothing like this. AI for sure.
Seth of the Fediverse@jeffjarvis I heard about this. But still wow. I thought Quebec would be going first. And looks like they already did from AI's point of view.
Roy #EatTheRich Pardee 🇺🇸
Georgia's in Florida...! [Idiocracy] (2006)
@jeffjarvis : "I smell AI" ... that's a great way to put it! Yes, there has been a separatist movement in Alberta for a long time, but the 1980 and 1995 referendums on separation were definitely in _Quebec, a largely French-speaking province of Canada_.
JK@jeffjarvis sorry, not from Canada and with English as my second language... can you explain this, please?
Thanks for confirming that AP sucks.
I do not read their nonsense to start with so I would have missed this.
ubersheetz@jeffjarvis Actual headline: Take Back Alberta (David Parker) proposes referendum to become the 51st US state.
Aaron@jeffjarvis Saw this in my own feed after seeing it here.
Grant 
🇨🇦@jeffjarvis How many fingers on THAT hand?!?
Reay@jeffjarvis @StaceyCornelius Once upon a time, the AP was a solid source for journalism. Now… 😬
@jeffjarvis All right, so here’s what I assume is the original article the summary was presumably based on:
https://apnews.com/article/canada-alberta-referendum-separation-b3da116c6800347f82da5011ee29f8f3
Now, as for the highlighted bit of the summary in question, check out this small paragraph four up from the end of the article:
“The largely French-speaking province of Quebec held referendums in 1980 and 1995 over separation. Both failed.”
In a vacuum, that’s a very clear statement. But in this context, what happened would seem to be that someone or something (and yeah, I’m with Jeff on this, the article writer wouldn’t make this kind of confusion) took the beginning of that chunk of text — “The largely French-speaking province of Quebec” — and assumed it was referring to Alberta, rather than a separate, related statement speaking only about Quebec.
That’s no journalist’s error. That’s done by a program that didn’t parse the statement’s context properly.
Unfortunately, it was still put out by AP, which looks really bad on them. And it still has the article writer’s name on it, which looks really bad on him.
If you’re going to use AI to save time by summarizing an article, someone somewhere familiar with the article (like, oh, the writer, perhaps?) should at least take a Quick Look at it to ensure the summary is correct.
Alberta's premier proposes referendum on separation from Canada
The premier of Alberta says she will hold a referendum next year on the energy rich province separating from Canada if citizens gather the required number of signatures on a petition. Speaking on a livestream address, Danielle Smith said she personally does not support the province leaving Canada and expressed hope of a “path forward” for a strong and sovereign Alberta within a united Canada. Smith’s announcement comes just one week after Prime Minister Mark Carney led the Liberal Party to a fourth consecutive federal government. It also comes as U.S. President Donald Trump continues to threaten Canada with tariffs and talk of the country becoming the 51st state.
@reay
Yes, it appears the AI had an antecedent problem.
Yes, it appears the AI had an antecedent problem.
Cowboy Who?@jeffjarvis Mon Dieu!