[rsynnott]

You're anthropomorphising too much. The machine did the correct thing; it's just that it is a prediction machine, not a magic question answering machine, so its 'correct' may not be what you wanted.

> I suppose we could get into details about epistemology and ontology about the nature of what an answer "is"

The machine has no concept of an 'answer'; when people call these things autocomplete on steroids, they're not really being that inaccurate.

[tombert]

It really isn’t anthropomorphizing at all. If I treat it like a black box it really is quite simple. I gave it an input in the form of English text, there is an objectively correct and incorrect form of English text that responds to the input, it gave me the incorrect one.

Literally no one here disputes that the it’s a glorified autocomplete, but that is completely irrelevant to if it correctly answered a question.

I find this kind of pedantry extremely annoying because it sounds insightful without actually saying anything. Like, no shit, it’s just doing what its algorithm dictates, no one, and I mean no one disputed that. The question of correctness and incorrectness falls into “how accurately did it respond to my query?”