Epistemological Slop
Lies, damned lies, and Google.
“I said, Who put all those things in your head?” —Lennon/McCartney, “She Said She Said”
For a while now, I’ve been meaning to write something about the corruption of the Google search engine, which strikes me as one of the defining stories of the information age. This is not that story. But it’s related. As I was writing my last post about television and thinking about the various cultural responses to TV in the sixties and seventies, I started wondering whether the Beatles ever mentioned television in a song. Nothing sprung to mind, which seemed odd given how important TV was to the band’s career.
So I googled it. I asked the world’s default search engine, “Did the Beatles ever mention television in their songs?” Google, as is its practice these days, presented at the top of its results an answer from Gemini, its AI chatbot: