today's AI ridiculousness (see also "GPS says drive through a lake")
At the end of the month I'm going to take a trip back to the place where I grew up, and my girlfriend is not from here so went looking up information about the place. She sent me a link titled "20 things to do in [my town]" posted in May of this year and said she thought I'd find it hilarious. Actually, it was seriously infurating. I will not be providing a link because I don't want that site, which has a domain name that makes it sound like a legit travel info page, to get any extra traffic.
Item #4 was about this history museum in a historic house, and the description would fit any historic house musuem. Thing is... It doesn't exist. Not even the address exists -- the given address was 101 First Street East, but the street itself doesn't start until the 300 block. If 101 existed, it'd be the parking lot for a grain warehouse.
Here's where I tell you that the town history museum, on the second floor of the local library (my grandmother was on the board, my mother has some of her childhood items in it) three blocks from that address on the main road, is never mentioned in this article.
Item #19 is very similar -- it speaks of a mission out at the edge of town which plays a part in local Native American history. This place doesn't exist and neither does the road it's supposedly on.
Here's where I tell you that about twenty miles away, there is an old Army fort that for a few years had been a Native school... and if you're familiar with what Native schools were about, namely trying to remove the 'indiginous' from the indiginous, you know this is isn't a thing to brag about. The old fort is still a tourist attraction but, again, it somehow wasn't listed in the article.
Item #17 was the one my GF pointed out: It calls the high school a great place to visit, since it's in a building from about 1910. I said, "you mean the one that burned down in the early 1960s, and all that is left there is the football stadium?" Where the school was is now a park, with a firestation built in the 1980s at one end; the new high school was built a mile away out in the boondocks.
Item #9 says a local attraction when in town is this lake... 61 miles away. I am aware plenty of locals go there, my family moored our fishing boat there for years, but an hour's drive is not "local".
Item #14 is also a water feature, the main river. You'd have to drive 25 miles to reach it though, it doesn't go anywhere near town. A friend from the area commented, "why didn't they also say Seattle [2.5 hours away] was nearby?" :-D
Additionally interesting: The bottom of the list says you can read about more attractions local to this area of Washington on this link to a town in Pennsylvania.
Furthermore interesting: The 'about us' page repeatedly claims this was written by humans (ahahah!!), and that you can visit their sister page which is about the financial worth of various celebrities.
Beside the obvious AI slop for a buck, I could be charitable and say that maybe entries #4 and #19 are a form of paper town¹ to see if anyone copies this site's contents. If anyone is stupid enough to duplicate every entry sight unforeseen, they get what they deserve. Google has never heard of those two places so 10 seconds of due dilligence...
¹There are at least two paper town nearby, actually: An old dictionary with maps of the state puts "White Castle" out in a field as a copyright trap; three miles from there is "Ashue" (oh look, an AI page exists!!) which is a whistle stop on the railroad so was actually A Place at one time but has never been a town, yet a 1950s local map printed the name in larger letters than the nearby actual towns, thus giving the illusion it's a population center. Its only real population is hundreds of starlings on the power lines.
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