It’s Friday the 13th and my editor and I had a question: Are there any interesting events in tech history that are tied to this famously inauspicious day?
So, we did the only logical thing in 2024: We asked AI, consulting both OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Perplexity. And the answers were…surprising.
The good news is there were no out-of-control, blatantly false hallucinations purporting that Gmail was invented by a serial killer in the woods, or that Marc Benioff meditates in a hockey mask.
But the weird thing was how evasively the chatbots behaved in relaying the answer (which appears to be that there aren’t really any significant tech events related to Friday the 13th), doing the AI equivalent of dancing around an issue.
For ChatGPT, what kicked back was a lot of events that happened…around Friday the 13th. For example, ChatGPT highlighted the launch of Microsoft Windows 95, which happened on Aug. 24, 1995, saying: “While not exactly on Friday the 13th, it's worth mentioning because its launch day was famously marked by a major marketing event and significant media buzz.” OK!
And that was more or less how the entire answer went. ChatGPT mentioned that Apple and Google have both rolled out product updates “around Friday the 13th.” It also highlighted Feb. 13, 2019, when NASA’s Mars rover Opportunity was officially declared dead—but emphasized that that wasn't a Friday.
I suppose you could argue we saw a minor ChatGPT hallucination in the bot’s opening which stated: “Friday the 13th has been a memorable day for various events in the tech industry.”
Next up was Perplexity, which offered different but similarly indirect answers. To its credit, Perplexity did actually give me something that happened on Friday the 13th: “Oct. 13, 1989: The stock market experienced a significant drop, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average falling by 6.91%...the timing on Friday the 13th added a layer of superstition to the event.” Not directly related to tech, but interesting.
However, from there it was completely random weather events and natural disasters, from the Jan. 13, 2012, sinking of the Costa Concordia cruise ship to the Oct. 13, 2006, Buffalo, N.Y. snowstorm that threw meteorologists for a loop.
To explain why it chose these events, Perplexity said: “These events illustrate a mix of economic, environmental, and safety-related incidents that have coincided with the superstitious date of Friday the 13th, often leading to discussions about luck and fate in the context of technology and society.”
The common thread with all these answers is that they duck the direct questions they’re asked. It reminds me of when I used to write chemistry lab reports in high school. Did I particularly understand valence electrons? No, but could I write around it enough that if I was lucky the teacher didn’t notice? Yes. But ChatGPT isn’t 16-year-old me, trying to get a good grade so I could get into college (though some kids trying to get into college may unfortunately be using ChatGPT).
Perhaps this is a guardrail designed to prevent wild hallucinations. Instead of inventing something out of whole cloth, the AI serves up a bunch of other information that may not perfectly answer the question but is at least not demonstrably false. If that’s the case though, why can’t a chatbot just say: Nope, sorry, don’t have the answer.
At a time when there are a lot of unanswered questions about how much AI can be trusted and what it means to regulate the technology, these results highlight a strange problem: How do you make sure the AI not only doesn’t serve up the wrong information, but also offers the right information?
And it turns out, there actually is one noteworthy tech event on Friday the 13th—as my colleague Kali Hays was first to report, X is officially shutting down its San Francisco headquarters today and moving employees to other locations in the Bay Area (and eventually Texas for some). There’s no dancing around that news.
Allie Garfinkle
The rest of today's Data Sheet was written by David Meyer.
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