So I asked an AI to plan my road trip and it suggested a ferry that doesn't exist

I was planning a weekend drive from Portland to the coast last month and thought I'd let an AI route planner handle the details... it told me to take a ferry across the Columbia River that's been closed since 2018. I stood at the dock for 20 minutes just staring at a chain link fence before I checked my phone. How do these things get their data so wrong when they're supposed to be learning and updating? Has anyone else caught an AI giving directions to places that just aren't there anymore?

3 comments

3 Comments

kai_webb911mo ago

lol for real though, jessej23 nailed it. I had Google Maps try to send me down a "road" in rural Oregon that was literally just a logging trail covered in moss and fallen trees. These AIs are basically just parroting whatever old data they were fed without any real understanding of what's actually there now. It's wild how confidently wrong they can be while acting like they know everything.

jessej231mo ago

it told me to take a ferry across the Columbia River that's been closed since 2018" ... see that's the thing that gets me. These AIs aren't really "learning" like we think they are. They're just grabbing old data from maps that maybe nobody updated. I bet the last time that ferry was in the system was when someone scanned a 2017 map. The problem is the companies training these things don't pay people to fact check every little road and ferry. They just feed them a bunch of internet data and hope it works out. It's like they taught a robot to read a travel guide from five years ago and called it good.

phoenix5731mo ago

Had a GPS once try to route me through a cornfield in Iowa because some old map still showed a road that'd been gone for twenty years.