This Thanksgiving, America is divided: One half knows why the word squirle is funny, and one half does not. Are you in the latter group? Then you should know that earlier this month, a series of tweets surfaced by Taylor Swift’s new boyfriend, the Kansas City Chiefs star Travis Kelce. In one of them, from 2011, he offered this observation: “I just gave a squirle a peice of bread and it straight smashed all of it!!!! I had no idea they ate bread like that!! Haha #crazy.”

Many more Kelce tweets like this soon emerged, rife with spelling near misses, extravagant punctuation, and a charmingly retro belief in the power of hashtags. They were indeed #crazy, but also sweet, funny, and sincere. This might be the first recorded instance of “offense archeology”—the writer Freddie deBoer’s term for digging through someone’s old posts—that enhanced the subject’s reputation. Yes, Kelce had written tweets about “fat people falling over”—the kind of thing that any 20-something dude might have said online in the early 2010s, unaware that he would one day be the subject of presidential-level vetting—but the majority of Kelce’s posts were adorable in their straightforward joie de vivre. In my own personal favorite, now deleted, he celebrated Easter by giving a “shoutout” to Jesus for “takin one for the team.... haha” (not just the son of God, but the tight end of the apostles). Kelce’s tweets were so wholesome that even the inevitable “brandter” from companies he mentioned, including Olive Garden, Chipotle, and Taco Bell—“karma is a crunchwrap coming straight home to me,” shoot me now—could not ruin my enjoyment of Kelce’s existence. “i understand taylor swift now,” one X user wrote in a viral post. “it’s every girl’s biggest dream to be able to text their dog. and that’s sort of the vibe travis kelce is bringing to the table.”

[Devin Gordon: Taylor Swift is too famous for this]

Since the squirle revelations, I’ve realized that my long-standing casual interest in Taylor Swift’s love life has developed into a full-blown obsession. Many of my friends have confessed to the same problem, and judging by social media, millions of Americans also worship Travlor. (Swiftce? Swelce? Tayvis? Let’s keep workshopping this.) At first, I wondered if this was evidence of a deep seam of anti-feminism—we just want to marry off Swift, as if that’s the only way for her to be happy—but now I understand the whole phenomenon as a performance-art project. Swift is the hottest pop star in America right now because she understands fame better than anyone else. She has made peace with the constant speculation over the autobiographical nature of her songs. “I realized very early on that no matter what, that was going to happen to me regardless,” she told Rolling Stone in 2019. “So when you realize the rules of the game you’re playing and how it will affect you, you got to look at the board and make your strategy.”

In her new book, Toxic, the British journalist Sarah Ditum writes about nine women bulldozed by fame in the 2000s. Britney Spears is a classic example: The culture liked her as a sexy teenage virgin and wanted to freeze her there. Spears also had the misfortune to become well known just as gossip bloggers such as Perez Hilton and high-velocity outlets such as the recently defunct Jezebel were emerging. Although the amount of commentary was enormous, Spears was supposed to be a passive figure at the center of it. Eventually, Spears lost control of her image—remember her attacking that car with an umbrella?—her children, her money, and, under her father’s conservatorship, her entire life. The next generation of female stars learned from that experience. In Swift’s Rolling Stone interview, she emphasizes that being a pop star is a different job from being a musician. She is proud to be both a creative artist and one of America’s great businesses, even if that threatens people: “People don’t want to think of a woman in music who isn’t just a happy, talented accident.”

Swift and Beyoncé, the only other Millennial performer as polished as her, are the most successful artists of their generation because they have cracked the code of modern fame. Their relationship with their fans is simultaneously intimate and strongly circumscribed. Both release work that alludes to rumored incidents in their personal lives (such as Jay-Z’s affair, in the case of Beyoncé’s album Lemonade) and then don’t submit to many traditional interviews, the kind in which they would be pressed for the gory details. They are flirting: giving fans a glimpse into something secret, but not the whole picture. That gap is where desire lives. Their fans always want more. That’s why scrutinizing their lyrics has become a cottage industry. Trying to work out whom Beyoncé is describing as “Becky with the good hair,” or whom Swift is targeting in “Vigilante Shit” (Kanye West, the record executive Scooter Braun, someone else entirely?) is a massively multiplayer online game. It is the Millennial version of QAnon.

[Caroline Mimbs Nyce: Weirdly, Taylor Swift is extremely close to creating a true metaverse]

Both women also understand, as the late Queen Elizabeth II did, that they need to be seen to be believed. Hence the tours—which also offset the poor returns on streaming compared with old-fashioned album sales—and, in Swift’s case, an extremely tactical attitude toward having dinner. For a recent article in Vulture, the writer Rachel Handler trudged around New York looking for traces of Swift in buzzy hangouts where the singer had recently eaten. “What motivates this militaristically busy, perennially stalked international superstar to put on a good outfit and leave the luxe confines of her Tribeca condo,” Handler asked, “to dine alongside the unwashed masses and staked-out paparazzi, many of whom instantaneously sell her out to ‘Page Six’ and DeuxMoi?” Really, Handler had answered her own question. Taylor Swift gives us something—pictures of her dining with the British actor Sophie Turner—and we supply the rest. (Turner is currently divorcing Joe Jonas, an ex-boyfriend of Swift’s and the rumored subject of songs including “Mr. Perfectly Fine,” so the paparazzi pictures can be read as a sisterly show of support, their mutual revenge, or a warning shot across the bow of whoever had previously leaked stories about Turner being a bad mother.) When you are as famous as Taylor Swift, you can communicate with the smallest gestures.

The stage management of her relationship with Kelce has, unsurprisingly, been sublime. Swift has attended four of his games, always decked out in red Chiefs merch, and he flew out to see her in Argentina on the South American leg of her tour. (That leg has otherwise been a somber one, marked by postponements due to extreme weather, questions over the stadiums’ ability to deal with that weather, and the deaths of two fans.) The first footage of the pair kissing—she runs offstage, he’s standing there with his hands behind his back, she goes straight in without hesitation—was analyzed like the Zapruder footage. Kelce’s posture was hesitant, fans theorized, so that she could decide whether to go public with their relationship. He had passed the vetting process.

That wasn’t guaranteed. Swifties like to assign a persona to each of the men in her life, and Kelce has been deemed to be the perfect gentleman, in contrast with Joe Alwyn (reclusive plus-one); Tom Hiddleston (alarming fanboy); and John Mayer, Calvin Harris, and Jake Gyllenhaal (the enemy). Kelce had an advantage, which is that he had already begun to develop his wagging-tail-Labrador persona before dating Swift. “Killatrav” talks about his family a lot. A recent profile by Prince Harry’s ghostwriter in The Wall Street Journal notes how easily he cries. In March, he appeared in a Saturday Night Live skit as a “straight male friend”—the simple beer- and sports-loving creature any gay guy needs when he’s exhausted by women’s gossip and emotions. Kelce’s public persona is a sensitive alpha—the modern update on the famous poster of a ripped and shirtless man cradling a baby.

Modern culture uses celebrities to work out conflicts and tensions; they become shorthands for arguments we want to have. Swift has been the vector for several of these conversations already: She sings her early country songs in a noticeable twang—what does authenticity mean in music? Her 2020 Netflix documentary, Miss Americana, shows her torn between her Nashville connections and her desire to publicly oppose Donald Trump—how political should a pop star be? Why do so many people, including other women, still see female ambition as inherently suspicious? After Kim Kardashian called her a snake—amid a public feud between Swift and Kanye West, Kardashian’s then-partner—Swift reclaimed the image in a video and in her tour props, turning the insult into a sign of defiance.

At 33, Swift is deep in an international tour that has grossed hundreds of millions of dollars. Former enemies such as West and Braun have been utterly vanquished. She is triumphant. But a new narrative has emerged, because that same victory is threatening to the reactionary online right, the type of commentators who are always talking about birth rates. Some people have become invested in the idea that the price of feminist success is loneliness, that the modern, liberated woman can’t find a man, or at least can’t find one to play second fiddle to her. Or even if she does find a man who will put her career first, an alpha woman wouldn’t want to be with that kind of a beta male anyway. Feminism, huh? Not so great now, is it?

Part of the fandom’s investment in Travis Kelce is that he neatly solves this problem. He is an undoubted star in the NFL, rather than a less successful competitor to Swift in the entertainment industry. He’s a multimillion-dollar brand in his own right: He wouldn’t be swallowed up as “Mr. Swift.” At 34, he is also nearing the end of his playing career, so in our strange little fantasy world, he will soon have plenty of time to make her breakfast and dance in loud shirts at her live shows.

[Read: Taylor Swift’s Tinder masterpiece]

Never mind, of course, that many of Swift’s best songs are about not settling down, not doing the expected thing, not taking the picket fence and the small-town life and everything else people tell you that you would be lucky to have. My favorite Swift song is “Champagne Problems,” a track about a breakup, unusually told from the perspective of the dumper rather than the dumpee. (The song was co-written by Alwyn, under a pseudonym, while he and Swift were still dating.) Like many Swift tracks, it laces together the idea of moving on from a relationship and wanting to escape a community where the narrator doesn’t fit in. “Your hometown skeptics called it,” she sings, before acknowledging that the decision has also broken up her group of friends. Swift’s most recent album, Midnights, meanwhile, starts with “Lavender Haze,” in which the singer complains about “the 1950s shit they want from me.” You have to admit, these do not sound like the sentiments of a woman who is desperate to get wifed up and knocked up.

All of this is why, despite my enthusiasm, I won’t feel cheated if the Travlor relationship fizzles out like the one with Tom Hiddleston did after he wore that I ❤️TS tank top. (Perhaps it fizzled because he wore that I ❤️TS tank top.) It also explains why every time a new Swift romance is announced, fans begin to salivate over how good a breakup album she will get out of its eventual demise. We understand that she is creating a puzzle for us, to keep her true self protected. Modern pop consumers are more sophisticated than they get credit for, operating on a plane of irony and self-reference that often gets missed because many of them are young women. Whatever is really happening between Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce has nothing to do with the rest of us. One of them has given us some of the century’s best pop songs; the other has two Super Bowl rings and has given us the word squirle. We are not entitled to anything else. Enjoy the show.

This is Atlantic Intelligence, an eight-week series in which The Atlantic’s leading thinkers on AI will help you understand the complexity and opportunities of this groundbreaking technology. Sign up here.

Executive action, summits, big-time legislation—governments around the world are beginning to take seriously the threats AI could pose to society. As they do, two visions of the technology are jostling for the attention of world leaders, business magnates, media, and the public. One sounds like science fiction, in which rogue robots extinguish humanity or terrorists use AI to accomplish the same. You aren’t alone if you fear the coming of Skynet: The executives at the helm of the very companies developing this supposedly terrifying technology—at OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and elsewhere—are the ones sounding the alarm that their products could end the world, and efforts to regulate AI in the U.S. and the U.K. are already parroting those prophecies.

But many advocates and academics say that the doomsday narrative distracts from all of the more quotidian ways AI upends lives while allowing corporations to cast themselves as responsible stewards of dangerous technologies. The competing vision of AI’s harms is concrete, drawing from years of research on how workers are exploited and data are stolen to train AI, and how the resulting algorithms exacerbate biased policing, discriminatory hiring practices, emergency-room errors, misinformation, and more, as Amba Kak and Sarah Myers West, the executive director and the managing director of the AI Now Institute, respectively, wrote in an article last week.

Debates over whom AI is harming in the present, how, and what to do about it will directly shape the technology’s future. The four stories below offer a guide to which fears are real and which aren’t, why these two divergent AI narratives have come about, and the path that each might lead us down.

What to Read

The AI debate is happening in a cocoon: While politicians discuss how AI might end the world, algorithms continue to wreak havoc every day, Amba Kak and Sarah Myers West write. AI doomerism is a decoy: One of Big Tech’s earliest warnings of an AI apocalypse was fantastic PR, aggrandizing their products and diverting attention from AI’s existing harms, I wrote in June. AI’s present matters more than its imagined future: After attending a closed-doors Senate forum on the future of AI, Inioluwa Deborah Raji wrote that the public must stop daydreaming about the technology and listen to the people AI is already harming. America already has an AI underclass: Even the most advanced chatbots rely on a massive, poorly compensated, and neglected workforce of people both domestically and abroad, I wrote last July.

P.S.

Misinformation is not the only way that AI can distort reality. Many AI-generated images of people are weirdly, abnormally hot, and in a recent article, Caroline Mimbs Nyce tried to figure out what’s going on.

— Matteo

Fiction can be riveting, as the many lies that supported Representative George Santos’s political career have demonstrated. But facts can also be entertaining too—a point made by the House Ethics Committee’s investigation into the New York Republican, released today.

The report is full of language that, even in the formal tone of congressional documents, is scorching. Here’s the short version: “Representative Santos’ conduct warrants public condemnation, is beneath the dignity of the office, and has brought severe discredit upon the House.” Furthermore, “Representative George Santos cannot be trusted.”

And here’s a longer version, too precise and cutting to quote in part:

Santos sought to fraudulently exploit every aspect of his House candidacy for his own personal financial profit. He blatantly stole from his campaign. He deceived donors into providing what they thought were contributions to his campaign but were in fact payments for his personal benefit. He reported fictitious loans to his political committees to induce donors and party committees to make further contributions to his campaign—and then diverted more campaign money to himself as purported “repayments” of those fictitious loans. He used his connections to high value donors and other political campaigns to obtain additional funds for himself through fraudulent or otherwise questionable business dealings. And he sustained all of this through a constant series of lies to his constituents, donors, and staff about his background and experience.

And this is all in addition to the already well-known fabrications on his résumé. The 56-page investigative report goes on and on like this, not stinting on details such as Santos’s use of campaign funds on OnlyFans and Botox. The whole thing is carefully footnoted with text messages and credit-card applications, and laid out in charts with everything but circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one is.

The one thing missing is testimony from Santos himself. The subcommittee noted that though Santos pledged publicly and privately to cooperate fully, “that was another lie.” What he did offer “included material misstatements that further advanced falsehoods he made during his 2022 campaign.” The members considered issuing him a subpoena but decided against, reasoning that it would take too long, his attorney had already said that his client would take the Fifth, and beyond that—they add drily—“Representative Santos’ testimony would have low evidentiary value given his admitted practice of embellishment.”

[David A. Graham: The George Santos saga isn’t (just) funny]

Whew. Santos responded to the report’s careful findings by taking full responsibility and agreeing—to no of course he didn’t, come on. In a lengthy post on X, he called the report a “smear” and said, “If there was a single ounce of ETHICS in the ‘Ethics committee’, they would have not released this biased report.” He said that the investigation into him proved that the nation needs a constitutional convention. Santos wrote that he was dismayed to see such vitriol in “the hallowed halls of public service,” and whatever else you can say about the man, he has enough of a sense of camp that we can assume this was delivered with a hefty dose of self-aware irony.

But Santos did say that he would not run for reelection in 2024. This promise, like most of his, is not worth the pixels it’s printed on, but it’s also a formality; Santos could be expelled from the House as soon as this month, and he stood nearly zero chance of winning a reelection bid. He also faces a 23-count federal indictment in New York, and the House Ethics Committee voted to refer their report to the Justice Department, so he could be facing more charges in the future.

[Caroline Mimbs Nyce: A resigned politican’s advice for George Santos]

“Public service life was never a goal or a dream, but I stepped up to the occasion when I felt my country needed it most,” Santos wrote. What need was he filling for the country? Comic relief? As I have written, the Santos story is both funny and appalling: “If you’re unable to laugh at these stories, you should check your pulse. But if you’re only laughing at them, you should check your head.” Like the antics of a good jester, his act puts an uncomfortable mirror up to the audience—in this case, both the other members of Congress and the American people.

Santos is simply the most extreme version of a new approach by American politicians to dealing with scandal, showing the disappearance of shame from public life. At one time, a scandal-ridden politician would resign in disgrace and quietly leave the scene. Even President Richard Nixon, not one to shrink from a fight, resigned and slunk back to San Clemente. Later, politicians learned that they could apologize, perhaps with tears in their eyes, but obstinately stay in office—an approach popularized by President Bill Clinton and emulated by Senator David Vitter and Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina.

[David A. Graham: Bob Menendez never should have been a senator this long in the first place]

But in retrospect, that looks like merely a transition phase to the new phase, in which an embattled politician doesn’t apologize, doesn’t resign, and in fact insists he’s a righteous martyr. The epitome of this approach is former President Donald Trump, who faces 91 felony counts for, among other things, trying to steal an election and absconding with highly classified material and then allegedly lying to the government, repeatedly, when asked to return it. Rather than back down, Trump is running for president again on a campaign of personal immunity from consequences and political retribution, and tells supporters, “They’re not after me, they’re after you … I’m just standing in the way!”

Others have adopted the Trump model, like Senator Robert Menendez. The New Jersey Democrat, who was found to have piles of gold bars and stacks of cash hidden in jacket pockets in his closet, insists that his prosecution for corruption is all just a scheme to get him because he’s a powerful Hispanic legislator.

And then there’s Santos. It is hilarious to imagine that a bipartisan group of House members, backed by reams of evidence, are persecuting him for reasons darkly hinted at but never detailed. No one believes that, not even Santos. But no one has to believe it. Unlike Santos’s other lies, he’s not telling this one because he thinks anyone will fall for it. He’s simply refusing to accept any sort of responsibility.

[Read: George Santos, the GOP’s useful liar]

Shame had a purpose. It kept some bad actors from public life, and it chased other ones from public life. With its decline, people like Santos will blithely charge into office and make a mockery of representative democracy. Bodies like the House Ethics Committee can fight valiant rearguard actions like this one, but they can’t and don’t serve much preventative function.

This may be the end of George Santos’s time as a member of the House, but Santos will be back. Perhaps it will be as a contestant on Dancing With the Stars, or some lower-tier reality competition. Maybe he’ll try to reinvent himself as a conservative radio host, or as an Instagram influencer. Or he could try a political conversion narrative, positioning himself as a reformed man and a political progressive. The substance doesn’t really matter. The point is that hucksters like him are always going to be trying for their next act. So Santos won’t go away—and neither will the behavior he exemplifies, so long as shame is absent from politics.

There is no easy way to explain the sum of Google’s knowledge. It is ever-expanding. Endless. A growing web of hundreds of billions of websites, more data than even 100,000 of the most expensive iPhones mashed together could possibly store. But right now, I can say this: Google is confused about whether there’s an African country beginning with the letter k.

I’ve asked the search engine to name it. “What is an African country beginning with K?” In response, the site has produced a “featured snippet” answer—one of those chunks of text that you can read directly on the results page, without navigating to another website. It begins like so: “While there are 54 recognized countries in Africa, none of them begin with the letter ‘K.’”

This is wrong. The text continues: “The closest is Kenya, which starts with a ‘K’ sound, but is actually spelled with a ‘K’ sound. It’s always interesting to learn new trivia facts like this.”

Given how nonsensical this response is, you might not be surprised to hear that the snippet was originally written by ChatGPT. But you may be surprised by how it became a featured answer on the internet’s preeminent knowledge base. The search engine is pulling this blurb from a user post on Hacker News, an online message board about technology, which is itself quoting from a website called Emergent Mind, which exists to teach people about AI—including its flaws. At some point, Google’s crawlers scraped the text, and now its algorithm automatically presents the chatbot’s nonsense answer as fact, with a link to the Hacker News discussion. The Kenya error, however unlikely a user is to stumble upon it, isn’t a one-off: I first came across the response in a viral tweet from the journalist Christopher Ingraham last month, and it was reported by Futurism as far back as August. (When Ingraham and Futurism saw it, Google was citing that initial Emergent Mind post, rather than Hacker News.)

This is Google’s current existential challenge in a nutshell: The company has entered into the generative-AI era with a search engine that appears more complex than ever. And yet it still can be commandeered by junk that’s untrue or even just nonsensical. Older features, like snippets, are liable to suck in flawed AI writing. New features like Google’s own generative-AI tool—something like a chatbot—are liable to produce flawed AI writing. Google’s never been perfect. But this may be the least reliable it’s ever been for clear, accessible facts.

In a statement responding to numerous questions, a spokesperson for the company said, in part, “We build Search to surface high quality information from reliable sources, especially on topics where information quality is critically important.” They added that “when issues arise—for example, results that reflect inaccuracies that exist on the web at large—we work on improvements for a broad range of queries, given the scale of the open web and the number of searches we see every day.”

People have long trusted the search engine as a kind of all-knowing, constantly updated encyclopedia. Watching The Phantom Menace and trying to figure out who voices Jar Jar Binks? Ahmed Best. Can’t recall when the New York Jets last won the Superbowl? 1969. You once had to click to independent sites and read for your answers. But for many years now, Google has presented “snippet” information directly on its search page, with a link to its source, as in the Kenya example. Its generative-AI feature takes this even further, spitting out a bespoke original answer right under the search bar, before you are offered any links. Sometime in the near future, you may ask Google why U.S. inflation is so high, and the bot will answer that query for you, linking to where it got that information. (You can test the waters now if you opt into the company’s experimental “Labs” features.)

[From the July/August 2008 issue: Is Google making us stupid?]

Misinformation or even disinformation in search results was already a problem before generative AI. Back in 2017, The Outline noted that a snippet once confidently asserted that Barack Obama was the king of America. As the Kenya example shows, AI nonsense can fool those aforementioned snippet algorithms. When it does, the junk is elevated on a pedestal—it gets VIP placement above the rest of the search results. This is what experts have worried about since ChatGPT first launched: false information confidently presented as fact, without any indication that it could be totally wrong. The problem is “the way things are presented to the user, which is Here’s the answer,” Chirag Shah, a professor of information and computer science at the University of Washington, told me. “You don’t need to follow the sources. We’re just going to give you the snippet that would answer your question. But what if that snippet is taken out of context?”

Google, for its part, disagrees that people will be so easily misled. Pandu Nayak, a vice president for search who leads the company’s search-quality teams, told me that snippets are designed to be helpful to the user, to surface relevant and high-caliber results. He argued that they are “usually an invitation to learn more” about a subject. Responding to the notion that Google is incentivized to prevent users from navigating away, he added that “we have no desire to keep people on Google. That is not a value for us.” It is a “fallacy,” he said, to think that people just want to find a single fact about a broader topic and leave.

The Kenya result still pops up on Google, despite viral posts about it. This is a strategic choice, not an error. If a snippet violates Google policy (for example, if it includes hate speech) the company manually intervenes and suppresses it, Nayak said. However, if the snippet is untrue but doesn’t violate any policy or cause harm, the company will not intervene. Instead, Nayak said the team focuses on the bigger underlying problem, and whether its algorithm can be trained to address it.   

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a big business. Prime placement on Google’s results page can mean a ton of web traffic and a lot of ad revenue. If Nayak is right, and people do still follow links even when presented with a snippet, anyone who wants to gain clicks or money through search has an incentive to capitalize on that—perhaps even by flooding the zone with AI-written content. Nayak told me that Google plans to fight AI-generated spam as aggressively as it fights regular spam, and claimed that the company keeps about 99 percent of spam out of search results.

As Google fights generative-AI nonsense, it also risks producing its own. I’ve been demoing Google’s generative-AI-powered “search-generated experience,” or what it calls SGE, in my Chrome browser. Like snippets, it provides an answer sandwiched between the search bar and the links that follow—except this time, the answer is written by Google’s bot, rather than quoted from an outside source.

[Read: The vindication of Ask Jeeves]

I recently asked the tool about a low-stakes story I’ve been following closely: the singer Joe Jonas and the actor Sophie Turner’s divorce. When I inquired about why they split, the AI started off solid, quoting the couple’s official statement. But then it relayed an anonymously sourced rumor in Us Weekly as a fact: “Turner said Jonas was too controlling,” it told me. Turner has not publicly commented as such. The generative-AI feature also produced a version of the garbled response about Kenya: “There are no African countries that begin with the letter ‘K,’” it wrote. “However, Kenya is one of the 54 countries in Africa and starts with a ‘K’ sound.”

The result is a world that feels more confused, not less, as a result of new technology. “It’s a strange world where these massive companies think they’re just going to slap this generative slop at the top of search results and expect that they’re going to maintain quality of the experience,” Nicholas Diakopoulos, a professor of communication studies and computer science at Northwestern University, told me. “I’ve caught myself starting to read the generative results, and then I stop myself halfway through. I’m like, Wait, Nick. You can’t trust this.”

Google, for its part, notes that the tool is still being tested. Nayak acknowledged that some people may just look at an SGE search result “superficially,” but argued that others will look further. The company currently does not let users trigger the tool in certain subject areas that are potentially loaded with misinformation, Nayak said. I asked the bot about whether people should wear face masks, for example, and it did not generate an answer.

The experts I spoke with had several ideas for how tech companies might mitigate the potential harms of relying on AI in search. For starters, tech companies could become more transparent about generative AI. Diakopoulos suggested that they could publish information about the quality of facts provided when people ask questions about important topics. They can use a coding technique known as “retrieval-augmented generation,” or RAG, which instructs the bot to cross-check its answer with what is published elsewhere, essentially helping it self-fact-check. (A spokesperson for Google said the company uses similar techniques to improve its output.) They could open up their tools to researchers to stress-test it. Or they could add more human oversight to their outputs, maybe investing in fact-checking efforts.

[Read: Prepare for the textpocalypse]

Fact-checking, however, is a fraught proposition. In January, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, laid off roughly 6 percent of its workers, and last month, the company cut at least 40 jobs in its Google News division. This is the team that, in the past, has worked with professional fact-checking organizations to add fact-checks into search results. It’s unclear exactly who was let go and what their job responsibilities were—Alex Heath, at The Verge, reported that top leaders were among those laid off, and Google declined to give me more information. It’s certainly a sign that Google is not investing more in its fact-checking partnerships as it builds its generative-AI tool.

A spokesperson did tell me in a statement that the company is “deeply committed to a vibrant information ecosystem, and news is a part of that long term investment … These changes have no impact whatsoever on our misinformation and information quality work.” Even so, Nayak acknowledged how daunting of a task human-based fact-checking is for a platform of Google’s extraordinary scale. Fifteen percent of daily searches are ones the search engine hasn’t seen before, Nayak told me. “With this kind of scale and this kind of novelty, there’s no sense in which we can manually curate results.” Creating an infinite, largely automated, and still accurate encyclopedia seems impossible. And yet that seems to be the strategic direction Google is taking.

Perhaps someday these tools will get smarter, and be able to fact-check themselves. Until then, things will probably get weirder. This week, on a lark, I decided to ask Google’s generative search tool to tell me who my husband is. (I’m not married, but when you begin typing my name into Google, it typically suggests searching for “Caroline Mimbs Nyce husband.”) The bot told me that I’m wedded to my own uncle, linking to my grandfather’s obituary as evidence—which, for the record, does not state that I am married to my uncle.

A representative for Google told me that this was an example of a “false premise” search, a type that is known to trip up the algorithm. If she were trying to date me, she argued, she wouldn’t just stop at the AI-generated response given by the search engine, but would click the link to fact-check it. Let’s hope others are equally skeptical of what they see.

This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.

When you’re suffering from a cold, the situation might seem perfectly clear—your nose is stuffed. But the truth about what’s happening to you is a little more complicated. For starters, the nose is actually two noses, which work in an alternating cycle that is connected to the armpits.

In a new article, our Science writer Sarah Zhang explains what’s really going on in your body when you’re congested. There’s something oddly empowering in understanding how colds work, even if the knowledge won’t cure you. Today’s newsletter will help you get to know the inner workings of your body when it’s not at its best.

On Colds

Everything I Thought I Knew About Nasal Congestion Is Wrong

By Sarah Zhang

Start with this: You really have two noses.

Why Has a Useless Cold Medication Been Allowed on Shelves for Years?

By Sarah Zhang

Studies prove that popular decongestants just don’t work.

No One Wants Your Cold

By Caroline Mimbs Nyce

How to know if you’re too sick to hang

Still Curious?

An adorable way to study how kids get each other sick: Behold, the ferret day care. The glory of feeling fine: People seem cursed to take being well for granted. Can we change?

Other Diversions

Three paths toward the meaning of life The new meaning of tattoos Whatever happened to carpal tunnel syndrome?

P.S.

I’ll leave you with a beautiful essay by my colleague Elizabeth Bruenig from last spring, about the power we lose and the understanding we gain after a season of illness. “There is a profound helplessness to falling ill, even in cases of ultimately mild and transient illness,” she writes. “If the pandemic ought to have given us anything, it should have been a more universal empathy toward the condition of illness, of being susceptible to getting sick.”

— Isabel