The Dance of Ignorance

By Tom Scocca

I wanted to look up Mikhail Baryshnikov’s Latvian origins, as one sometimes wants to look up something factual like that. I typed “baryshnikov” into the Chrome browser on my phone and selected “Mikhail Baryshnikov” from the top of the list of choices, and the phone went to a Google results page. 

At the top was a blob of unreadably generic text (“Overview / Mikhail Nikolayevich Baryshnikov is a Russian-American dancer, choreographer and actor”). Below that on the screen were two inset boxes showcasing a recent New York Times thinkpiece about Baryshnikov and a YouTube video; below those was a box of “Quick facts,” including “Born: Jan 27, 1948, Riga, Latvia,” which weren’t visibly sourced to anything. 

By now I’ve learned to usually scroll past everything at the beginning of a Google search result, but I was on the phone and in a hurry, so instead I just spotted the word “Wikipedia” at the bottom of the text-blob and tapped on that. 

The word “Wikipedia,” in blue letters, was not a hyperlink to the Wikipedia page for Mikhail Baryshnikov. Instead, it brought up a paragraph-shaped object produced by Google’s generative artificial intelligence program. “Baryshnikov is known for dancing both classical and modern ballet,” it said. “He is considered by some to be the world’s greatest living male ballet dancer.” At the bottom of that, above the line saying “Generative AI is experimental. Learn more,” was a little emblem of chain links. I tapped the emblem.