Artificial intelligence is everywhere. Two of this year’s Nobel Prizes, in physics and chemistry, went to AI-driven discoveries. It’s in commercials, it’s intruding on our apps, it’s writing essays for lazy kids — it’s probably harvesting every word of this column for digital compost.
AI renders its judgments with a distressing combination of confidence and inaccuracy, which is truly a sign of the times, if not the apocalypse. But even by these wobbly standards, there’s one subject it knows jack-bleep about: baseball.
Just for fun, a friend of mine entered the following prompt into one of the popular chatbots: “I’m giving a speech at the Baseball Hall of Fame. Give me five difficult baseball trivia questions and answers that I can ask an expert audience.”
What follows are its actual questions and answers, unedited, along with my analysis and utter confusion. I asked the same question so we could get to 10.
Spoiler alert: every single one of these is wrong.
Question: In what specific year did …