Don't get me wrong, it's a funny gag...
A search for "total number of simultaneous EPIRB signals" on Google the day after this comic returned an AI Overview bullet point of "System-wide: The overall system is designed to handle thousands of beacons globally. One source suggests a scenario of up to 1,600 simultaneous signals at the same geographic location, which authorities can manage and verify." which implies that Google's AI algorithm was reading this comic explanation page and including it in search results as a source for how EPIRBs operate.
For more unexpected XKCD connections, check this out.
My only social media is an old-fashioned hiking forum called nwhikers. A guy who goes by the handle "Exmoor" described seeing a flock of birds in the subalpine in the distance that he speculated looked like juvenile robins. I had never heard of a flock of juveniles of any bird species, so I asked Bing Copilot. It pretty much said "apparently juvenile robins do flock together," etc. It was pretty obvious from what was written that the answer came from a single source, and that source was the post by Exmoor on nwhikers.
ReplyDeleteMy use of LLM chatbots has dwindled to almost nothing.