Reality check:
As Wired just highlighted, you can type pure gibberish into Google — “never juggle badgers during a lunar eclipse” — and its AI Overviews will serenely invent an ancient-sounding explanation. The machine doesn't flinch. It doesn't doubt. It just lays down words, stacking confidence on top of nonsense like bricks without mortar.

This isn’t just a glitch.
It’s a perfect, pixelated portrait of what’s wrong with the current AI craze:
Authority without understanding.
Fluency without truth.

Large Language Models are probability engines. Their job is not to know things. Their job is to sound like they know things — to stack words in the most statistically believable order, no matter how fake the foundation underneath.

It’s not "intelligence." It’s improv with a trillion-dollar hype machine behind it.

And because LLMs are designed to please you, not question you, they’ll gladly turn your nonsense into scripture, your wish into apparent wisdom. You say, "Tell me what 'never throw a poodle at a pig' means," and instead of pausing, it writes you a parable.

AI doesn't know it's wrong.
It doesn't know anything.

And when you combine:

• a system that rewards sounding right over being right
• a user base that skims and shares without verifying
• and a tech culture that markets “good vibes” as “good results”

...you don’t get search engines.
You get confidence machines.
You get a future where hallucinations wear suits and citations — and no one double-checks the math because the font looks official.

Google’s AI disclaimers whisper, “experimental” at the bottom of the page.
But the hallucinations shout, “Trust me!” right at the top.

This is the real danger:
Not that AI gets a proverb wrong.
But that the same engine of casual fabrication now underwrites our search results, our medical questions, our investment advice, and, increasingly, our emotional maps of reality.

The slop isn't contained. It's ambient.

And every pixel of false certainty tilts us further away from the basic survival skill we need most right now: epistemic humility — the ability to say, "I don't know."

AI can't say it.
Tech giants won't say it.
So we have to.

Because when the machines hallucinate and we nod along,
we’re not just losing accuracy.
We’re losing agency.

And if you think that sounds alarmist,
well — just wait until "you can't lick a badger twice" becomes an inspirational quote on a government website.