You can ‘dunce’ if you want to — but don’t

After the Soviet Union fell in 1991, a dad asked a local elementary school why the classroom maps for that part of the world still said “U.S.S.R.” The way he told it, the classroom teacher gave him a blank stare.

I believe the story because a decade later — in that same elementary school — the maps still said “U.S.S.R.”

This was long ago, of course, and those pull-down maps were huge and expensive. Replacing them in every classroom was not a priority in the age of George Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” program.

This was also a period before the internet soaked our lives in its ubiquity. It wasn’t long after that paper maps yielded to Mapquest printouts, which gave way to maps on our phone, which then morphed into an accompanying, customizable voice, directing our every turn.

I’ve dubbed my map voice, “Felicity” because she’s British. Sometimes Felicity gets it wrong, especially in deep, rural areas, especially if I want to take a road less traveled. That’s why I still keep paper maps in my car.

Believe it not, there is still uncharted territory in Google mapping. “Proceed to the route,” is not helpful while Felicity recalibrates.

We’ve got so much information at the press of our thumbs, yet we can still go astray. Our reliance on technology can blunt certain skills, like remembering addresses or phone numbers. Is that a big deal? You’d have to ask a cognitive scientist for their analysis, but using your brain, even to recall an old address (314 3rd St. NW) seems like a good use of synapses.

Google used to be the go-to, and in an effort to remain relevant, Google now offers an AI answer for every query. I suppose it’s an attempt to give Claude, Chat GPT, or OpenAI competition, but any of these tools can be skewed, misleading, or plain wrong.

For example, early in the escalation of AI, educators and researchers noticed that some citations at the end of published articles looked odd. Turns out that AI can hallucinate, which is another word for lying.

AI can create false citations that look real.

It can make up a fictitious journal name. Worse, perhaps, it can use a real journal name but plug in the name of a known author, but they did not write said article. Or, it can fabricate volume and issue numbers or dates of publication.

That’s not all. At a recent AIDS conference in Brazil, a member of the U.S. State Department showed a map of African countries where AIDS cases were of high concern, and what a crazy quilt of geographical mayhem it was!

Reuters reported that every country was mislabeled, although other news stories said that only a few were wrong. Reuters further discovered that the map had been made by OpenAI, and the State Department staffer didn’t notice the errors.

One news article said that the staffer made a last-minute change to a slide on the Powerpoint. I’ll grant that, if rushed by last-minute changes or unforeseen problems, it might happen. Still, it’s not unfair to expect a State Department employee to know Africa’s geography if it’s the subject of a presentation.

This incident feels like just another messed-up day for the current administration. The Reflecting Pool got messed up twice and the Epstein file redactions were done incorrectly, to name just two recent examples. The former is stupid; the latter is dangerous.

What sickens many of us is the fact that accountability and reliability are fast becoming relics. Sloppiness is a slide toward “anything goes” and it feels like the ramp has been well oiled.

At least, in the State Department case, they owned their error and didn’t try to make it Biden’s or Obama’s fault. There is that. And thank goodness someone in the audience knew their geography and could point out that the map was flawed. Thank goodness someone still knows what’s what and where it’s at.

It saddened me that my kids never took a geography class. Studying other countries was very lightly folded into social studies when they went to school, and it showed. They would sometimes ask if a certain country was in Europe or Africa. Or get confused whether Berlin was a city or a country. This was hard for a map-loving nerd-mother to hear.

That was then. Now, you can just whip out your phone and discover a slew of facts about Berlin’s history — if you have a reputable source. It’s easier to find information, but it’s harder to trust it. We must now be both fact-checker and consumer, ensuring that search results are true and not a fever dream of some large language model.

There are still enough of us who believe that facts and precision matter. We need to insist upon it.

Joan Zwagerman writes from Storm Lake.