Date: 9/16/26 4:40 pm From: <eaubrey...> Subject: RE: [ia-bird] Re: AI - Funny Not Funny
So, the packaging looks authentic, but the contents could be garbage. That’s my fear, as well as my observation of how some folks use AI search engines. How do we teach people to be vigilant? Probably not a question for the listserv.
From: <ia-bird...> <ia-bird...> On Behalf Of Carson Noble
Sent: Wednesday, September 16, 2026 18:31
To: IA-BIRD <ia-bird...>
Subject: [ia-bird] Re: AI - Funny Not Funny
Thanks for bringing these things up!
While I've seen people make competent use of these tools, it's important to acknowledge that they are first and foremost a language model - they're really good at producing content that sounds (more or less) like the type of stuff that fluent speakers would create, but that's only because they're trained on a corpus that's been written by real people. This *can* mean they produce statements and claims that are accurate, but it's certainly not a guarantee.
Vigilance is required when using AI systems because they will almost always *sound* cohesive and confident, even if the content of the output is incorrect.
On Wednesday, September 16, 2026 at 5:43:29 PM UTC-5 eaubrey wrote:
Birders, please indulge me. I watch Bald Eagle cams on the internet and participate in Facebook groups that monitor and comment on breeding activities at various nests. Last February, I watched a Bald Eagle female at a nest in Fort St. Vrain, Colorado lay her first egg of the season. The nest has 2 live streaming cameras pointed at the nest, one of them above the nest giving a more-or-less overhead view, the other on a limb adjacent to the nest, giving a side view. Each cam includes a timestamp. Viewers of Bald Eagle nests on the internet know all this. I was watching the side cam view when the female (whom we call “Mom”) laid her egg, and I posted the news in the Fort St. Vrain Eagles Facebook group, telling viewers which cam I was watching, and what timestamp they could rewind to so they could watch:
"Mom has laid her first egg, 2/23/2006, at 20:03 on the side cam."
Immediately, Facebook’s AI offered readers of my post a question that they might like to ask about this, which made clear its complete misunderstanding of my post, and included its own answer to its own ridiculous question:
Over the next half hour, Meta AI edited its answer to its idiotic question, maybe because it got some feedback that it wasn’t quite getting the context right (not to mention some critical thinking, perception of grammar in my original post, and propensity to just make things up). Here are some of its “corrected” answers to its question:
Meta AI finally gave up, ending its last attempt with the observation Mom “likely” laid her egg in the nest, not on the cam. It stopped offering the question “Why is the egg laid on the side cam?”
