The Case of the Phantom Scottish Festival
AI Fooled Me, But Who Fooled It?
In a nutshell: I found out over a year ago that I am more Scottish than anything else, as recounted here.
A friend was happy to know this, because he’s also Scottish (my nickname for him is Mohawk Scotty, after hearing about what he did, hairdo-wise, while in high school, that got him in trouble with his father). He wanted somebody to go with to the annual (or so we thought) Scottish festival in Monterey (California).
That sounded interesting to me, so I googled when the festival was to take place, and according to the Interwebs, it was to be today (7/16/2024) and tomorrow, as can be seen here:
So we met at the fairgrounds today, something we’d been planning on and looking forward to for many months. Nothing was going on. There was no Scottish festival, or Scottish/Celtic festival, or even any event at all.
Mohawk Scotty was told by an employee of the Monterey Fairgrounds that he knew nothing about the Scottish festival, but that Scotty should use google to find out when the festival would be held (why wouldn’t an employee know or have access to which events were going to take place there?!?). At any rate, Mohawk is tech-averse, so I did the googling when I got home. In addition to what I had found previously (shown above) — which was still part of the search results! — I also found this:
So AI was fooled. Perhaps by the same website that had fooled me? I don’t know. But the moral of the story is, be aware of information AI provides you with, as it may just be regurgitating something it scraped up somewhere, which may or may not be accurate.
I then did what I probably should have done in the first place (I wonder why it didn’t turn up in my original google search) and consulted the Monterey County Fairgrounds official website. There too, though, frustratingly, I could not find a list of upcoming events. It may be buried there in some nook or cranny, but if it is, it’s hidden away cleverly enough that I didn’t find it, and neither did AI, apparently.
So the disappointment and frustration of this debacle left me as you see below.
UPDATE 7/21/2024
Perhaps it’s not surprising that the two places I contacted about how their bad info led to the mishap have not responded at all. Embarrassed? Asleep at the wheel?
