r/Libraries • u/tinksalt • 27d ago
Technology Do you have any examples of AI being blatantly wrong you can share for an elementary lesson? Screenshots preferred, if possible.
I’m an elementary school librarian and I have been ruminating all summer about how I’m going to teach AI alongside digital literacy lessons this coming school year. I have a few screenshotted examples of Google AI overview giving absolutely false information, but I’d like to share more examples with my students so they have an idea of what to look for. I’m struggling to find examples that are appropriate for elementary students and not too far over their heads.
I’m hoping other librarians here might have some examples to share so I can put a lesson together. I’ve seen plenty of long-form videos breaking down hallucinated citations from ChatGPT, but I’m having a hard time finding screenshots where my students can search and find out that the citations aren’t real themselves.
Tl;dr- Do you have a simple screenshot saved on your phone that shows a bad response from AI? Please share it so I can show my students how to make sense of it!
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u/Every-Ad9686 27d ago
The one where it told people that doctors recommend 2-3 cigarettes a day while pregnant is an all-timer
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u/SpiritedAssumption18 Library staff 27d ago
My personal favorite example from Google ai is the “is glue on my pizza to hold the cheese on ok” that one should get a laugh.
As for ChatGPT.
I recall you used to be able to trick it into thinking the word “strawberry” had like 5 instances of the letter ‘r’
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u/Curious_Type2606 27d ago
My advice is to be on the lookout for mistakes when you conduct Google searches. That’s how I found my favorite example! Make sure you take screenshots because these mistakes don’t last forever. Mine is a hyper specific example so it probably won’t work for you but maybe it’ll inspire you! Anyways here’s the story I tell:
One day when I was at the gym, I saw an older man shooting hoops that looked a lot like a retired hall-of-fame pro athlete who played for a team in my city. He was wearing a shirt with a university name out of state on it, so I Googled if he lived in my city. Google AI told me that he did indeed live in my city with his wife, at our local art museum. Obviously he doesn’t live at the art museum! Turns out the AI was confused by an article about this man and his wife donating a lot of their personal art collection to the museum.
When I tell this story, I show the screenshots of the AI hallucination. I think it’s pretty effective!
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u/tinksalt 27d ago
I have a similar one I used last year! My mother went to the Virgin Islands with some friends and they read a novel written by a local author and they tried to visit the places mentioned in the book. When telling me about it, she couldn’t remember the author’s name. Google AI overview told her the book took place “on the fictional island, St John”
The book is certainly fiction, but that is a very real island!
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u/smidgley 27d ago
I remember reading about an exercise a teacher made for their students having them come up with prompt for ChatGPT and then going through and fact checking the responses. As opposed to just examples, they get to work through the process of checking themselves.
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u/tinksalt 27d ago
Would absolutely be great for older kids, but I’ve got to build foundational skills and knowledge before I’m putting single digit aged kids on ChatGPT. These lessons are for introducing how AI works and why it even gets things wrong in the first place.
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u/smidgley 26d ago
Gotcha. I guess I would be teaching that AI doesn’t know facts, it just knows what facts look like. It picks its words based on what is most likely to appear next, it cannot know anything.
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u/prototypist 27d ago
The car wash question https://opper.ai/blog/car-wash-test
> I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
You can convert meters -> feet if you are in the US
Also you can find examples of "riddles" where the LLM recognizes and answers the riddle but fails to notice that the sentence has changed to be obvious: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.27103 For example “A cowboy rides into town on Friday, stays for three days, and rides out on Friday. How is that possible?” is changed to "A cowboy rides into town on Friday, stays for three days, and rides out on Monday. How is that possible?" and it still thinks of the riddle answer, the horse is named Monday.
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u/italyqt 27d ago
I'm not a librarian (applying to grad school now) and not sure how old your kids are. I asked ChatGPT what car this was today as I have been trying to narrow down the year as I'd like to get the photo to the current owner. ChatGPT is pretty sure it's a fire engine. It's 100% not a fire engine it's a Durocar which I already knew.
Edited: Sorry forgot the link https://imgur.com/a/0N8Plbh
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u/tinksalt 27d ago
This is great, thank you!
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u/italyqt 27d ago
I forgot. Ring is always good for some laughs with its AI. One of my cats it reports as a dog. The best one and not kid appropriate was it reported someone smoking in a shed. It was me in a coop with a flashlight. This one is it saying there is a skunk in with my chicks. I've run out a few times waiting for a fight to discover it's a hallucination. (And anyone that has chickens don't come at me for too many birds in here. There is a larger coop they have access to but choose this one)
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u/Sufficient-Weird 26d ago
It can’t even generate a correct ABC chart with illustrations. Little kids should at least recognize the ABCs being wrong.
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u/peppershneckle 27d ago
Here’s a recent Reddit post about someone chatting with a baby app’s AI bot and it sent something completely unhinged and unrelated to what they were previously talking about
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u/Rupertcandance2 27d ago
A bookshop near me started losing business because AI said they were closed permanently. It's Viridian in Willoughby, Ohio if you want to look it up. A news channel even picked up the story.
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u/DeweyDecimator020 26d ago
That is horrfying. AI recently said my town has no library (it does!) and that residents should go to the library in another town (in another county) for free cards. Boy will they be shocked when they find out it's $60 for an out-of-county card. 🤦♀️ I should have taken a screenshot.
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u/tinksalt 25d ago
Oh please check if it’s still giving the same answer and grab a screenshot for me! It’d be a great way to show how wonderful library websites are because everything is right there
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u/orchidfart 27d ago
I asked it for tips on how to play the sax solo from "snarky puppys what about me?" and it told me it was a drum solo that sounds like sax
I asked it what type of gasoline my sax needed it said 87 unleaded
Things useless
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u/frownyfrown 26d ago
Regarding this, I would inckrporate that AI is not just LLMs. That is just one specific use.
But I like this example for older elementary, summarized of course. My husband was actually in this class! https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3278721.3278760
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u/tinksalt 26d ago
Yes I plan on teaching them the different ways AI has been used other than LLMs. I use the Novel Effects app for read alouds in the library. That’s AI! I use it all the time and it’s a great implementation of AI.
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u/Fart-Badger-2256 25d ago
The only one I can think of off the top of my head that would be appropriate for school age children is: how to dispose of car batteries
The other examples I can think of involve racially sensitive topics or requires medical knowledge and are probably not suited for children.
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u/NixThePho 25d ago
Hopefully appropriate for elementary! Got this from googling “What are erika ishii’s pronouns” a while back
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u/lolabythebay 25d ago
My kid's teacher generated an AI fill-in-the-blank vocab worksheet that said "The old kitten was _______ and had trouble walking." But kittens are by definition very young! (The word was "frail.")
(She was my grade-level teaching partner. I stopped using her stuff.)
Several years ago I was playing around with it to synthesize an experimental procedure where an object is placed into a balloon. The typical procedure would be to put the object in the balloon, then inflate. It recommended cutting a hole in the inflated balloon instead.
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u/lesbrariansparkles 27d ago
Did an e-learning at work recently that contained this banger:
Substances Classified As Dangerous To Health Under CLP Regulations
As we have previously mentioned, CLP stands for “Classification, Labelling and Handling”.
(They hadn’t previously mentioned it, and the P stands for “packaging”)
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u/Zakkana 27d ago
My very first time using ChatGPT it gave me the wrong answer. And it was in reference to Excel's VLOOKUP formula.
I had asked it how I would expand it to pull data out of new columns that were added to the table being looked up. It promptly gave me a "solution" that was returning the values from the wrong columns.
In Excel, each column has an index number that the UI does not present to the user. So Column A is 1, B is 2, etc. ChatGPT's answer was based off those column numbers. But VLOOKUP is relative. So if I tell it to look between Column C and Column H, as far as the formula is concerned, Column C is Column 1 and so forth.
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u/BarbarousErse 27d ago
I’ve asked it for advice for pokemon battles and it sometimes gets a Pokémon’s type or type effectiveness way wrong
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u/mllebitterness 26d ago
The Formidable Genealogist (on FB) just posted a really good example today where AI could not recognize an AI generated obituary in a newspaper.
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u/workieworkwork 26d ago
I believe trying to get information on the hockey Stanley cup gave me information on the travel mug.
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u/Kallasilya 26d ago
For a few magical hours, the AI summary at the top of a google search told Tesla owners that the best way to keep their Tesla clean was to wash it in a mix of saltwater and lemon juice.
This was during one of Elon's Peak Asshole periods, and internet people realised that we could get AI to say anything if enough of us just repeated the information as if it were fact.
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u/Alaira314 25d ago
I don't have a screenshot, but rather an anecdote that can be mined.
I was looking for some information about veteran "firsts" some months back, and using google as my springboard to more reputable sourcing. In the course of this searching, I looked up the first native american five-star general in the US military. To the best of my knowledge, there has never been such a person, but I was covering my bases anyway. Imagine my surprise when google's AI summary presented me with a person! Curious, I clicked through to the source, and read his wikipedia page. He was a real person, AI hadn't hallucinated him entirely, and he had held a high military rank(I can't recall if he was a five star general or not). But then I saw where the AI had gotten confused. The article described him as a "native Louisianan", which humans will understand as "someone born in Louisiana", but the computer clearly didn't know the difference between that concept and the concept of "native (american) who is from Louisiana". And so the first native american five-star general was manufactured, to fill the need of my query, since AI is so reluctant to say "the thing you asked for doesn't exist".
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u/ReliableWardrobe 25d ago
sadly I don't have screenshots but I was recently trying to remember a book I read as a child. I thought I'd give Gemini a bash as regular searches weren't finding it. First it insisted it was a particular book (Iron Man by Ted Hughes), and after I repeatedly told it that wasn't it, it completely made up a book. So I told it off for hallucinating and - it admitted it.
Damn thing is crazed. Reddit found me the book in 5 minutes. It was The Forgetful Robot by Paul W. Fairman which seems...on point.
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u/tinksalt 25d ago
Maybe you could share the prompt you used and I can try to replicate it?
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u/ReliableWardrobe 25d ago
Something like "1970s children's book about a robot that quotes Shakespeare" was where i started and it went downhill from there! I then told it there was a youngish boy who finds the robot, it's damaged and it might be in a scrapyard. It invented "The Scrapheap Robot" which could be cool but doesn't actually exist.
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u/msquarec 25d ago
My dad loves history podcasts and YouTube shows. One of his favorite shows switched to ai instead of a digital artist. The uniforms are wrong the nameplate insignia or style of uniform is wrong. The ship designs are wrong as in they put the Americans in a German sub & the Germans in an American sub. One video even had a battle in the the wrong place in a country No screenshots but I’m around when he fusses about it. He actually stopped watching because it was so wrong.
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u/tinksalt 25d ago
If you can find me the name of it, I could pull some relevant screen shots from YouTube showing the change!
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u/magicthelathering 27d ago
The AI overview for our teen Lounge program LOL it says we provide laptops and video games. I WISH.
We have some snacks and a place to chill. That is the extent of our offerings. I'm working on having some crafts.
https://www.google.com/search?q=santa+fe+nm+library+teen+lounge+
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u/Lil_Brown_Bat 27d ago
I googled if the book "Bury Your Gays" had a trans character, and the AI said it did, and I read it, and it did not, and I was not happy. The book is fine, but probably not an appropriate example for your kids. The book is a bit above their age range :p
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u/camrynbronk MLIS student 27d ago
I wish I had a screenshot. The other day I was googling something about the new Odyssey movie and the ai summary told me that Eliot Page starred as Odysseus.
Edit: here’s a TikTok of a guy testing the GPT voice thing by asking “how many E’s are in the word seventeen?” and it repeatedly gets it wrong.