Out of curiousity I asked GPT-4 to spot any oddities with the places it suggested, and it was able to identify Ottawa Food bank being odd one out. --- The places and attractions suggested in the article are genuine and well-known sites or events in Ottawa, making them suitable suggestions for visitors. Here's a summary: The Winterlude Festival: An annual winter festival celebrated in Ottawa and Gatineau, known for it…
For future reference, add "be concise in your response"
Yeah, thanks, agreed, thought as well in the middle of exercise, I definitely should have.
That sounds like a surprisingly fortunate mistake, because you would hope recommending others to go to a food bank will encourage (and actually make some of) them to give something to the needy there. The suggestion the AI makes to consider going into it on an empty stomach could help the tourist to empathise with others who are less fortunate, because those are people who feel hungry every day. (Although the suggest…
I don't understand what food banks are for. Does Canada have something like Food Stamps/WIC? Food is absurdly cheap, and not all food needs to be cooked/prepared.
They are places, commonly run by volunteers, where people with financial problems can get a food package at regular intervals, e.g. weekly.
They sometimes rely on food donated by supermarkets with a 'best before' which has passed - which isn't a big deal for certain types of food such as rice and pasta.
Yeah probably a lot of wifi clients there. Isn't that how Google maps measure activity? By monitoring the wifi traffic of android phones?
Most [0] people have phones, so if food banks are well-used, they're going to be a WiFi attractor. This is a highly likely explanation. [0] My spouse is a social services worker who specializes in the homeless. She says having a phone is a priority among social services recipients, but they rarely have a data plan (which is very expensive in Ottawa) and rely on WiFi for everything.
But it's weird to rely on a thing like that in the first place. Unless you were able to differentiate between locals and foreigners. Because there would be many other destinations as well, that locals would be likely to group within, but which make no sense as travel destinations. Schools, churches, workplaces, gyms, markets etc.
It seems like non-locals would be unlikely to visit a food bank.
That sounds like a surprisingly fortunate mistake, because you would hope recommending others to go to a food bank will encourage (and actually make some of) them to give something to the needy there. The suggestion the AI makes to consider going into it on an empty stomach could help the tourist to empathise with others who are less fortunate, because those are people who feel hungry every day. (Although the suggest…
I don't understand what food banks are for. Does Canada have something like Food Stamps/WIC? Food is absurdly cheap, and not all food needs to be cooked/prepared.
The exact situation depends on the province but nothing exactly like food stamps that I’m aware of. Most of the support is through direct payments.
It takes time to access any of those benefits though, and there are still some that despite access to those struggle for whatever reason.
Food banks are not an exclusively Canadian thing - a lot of people in the U.K. have ended up depending on them as well.
I don't understand what food banks are for. Does Canada have something like Food Stamps/WIC? Food is absurdly cheap, and not all food needs to be cooked/prepared.
They are places, commonly run by volunteers, where people with financial problems can get a food package at regular intervals, e.g. weekly. They sometimes rely on food donated by supermarkets with a 'best before' which has passed - which isn't a big deal for certain types of food such as rice and pasta.
>They sometimes rely on food donated by supermarkets with a 'best before' which has passed
Oh! That makes a bunch of sense. Good idea to have a food bank to get rid of aging food.
Hints of the new SEO... LLMO? I can see a dystopian future where OpenAI / Bard generate revenue by tailoring the model's output to suit a client's message.
Maybe a factor in the model spitting out these absurdities, is that it has consumed a ton of regular old SEO absurdities already and does it best to match the genre.
For instance I found out recently, if I search for Karigasniemi, Google recommends a site with the "top 10 hotels in Karigasniemi". It's a tiny, tiny border village in the middle of nowhere. Needless to say it doesn't have 10 hotels.
I have started coming across articles that seem legitimate except for bizarre patois used in the subheadings specifically: "How Long Be The Game?" "What Mean By Corner Kick?" which I'm assuming as an AI summarization artefact
It's weird there would be errors like if it was AI generated since the latest AI definitely does not make mistakes like that.
Could be outsourced articles with translation errors? I don't know. Or some custom made LLM.
At Audiala, we use a heuristic approach that leverages existing curated lists of points of interests and generative AI to produce the relevant content. The Ottawa food bank didn't make it to our list :)
Why do we still read articles? I get the entertainment aspect but it's pretty clear we ll never have to read an article about travel destinations, we will be asking the AI itself, or reddit
Only insofar as travel blogs are shallow SEO spam. Good travel blogs maintained by locals are immensely valuable. They usually have much better technical advice about local culture, airports, payment, SIM cards and that sort of thing.
As a local of a tourist destination: why would you trust us? We want to take your money.
They are places, commonly run by volunteers, where people with financial problems can get a food package at regular intervals, e.g. weekly. They sometimes rely on food donated by supermarkets with a 'best before' which has passed - which isn't a big deal for certain types of food such as rice and pasta.
>They sometimes rely on food donated by supermarkets with a 'best before' which has passed Oh! That makes a bunch of sense. Good idea to have a food bank to get rid of aging food.
yep. I used to volunteer in one, we had a large warehouse and everything revolved around best before dates. We had quite a few people on our lists, often single mothers with kids. We'd make up packages for them each week. A big part of it (for me at least) was giving treats so the mothers would have something nice they could give for the poor kids :( not too much of course, majority by weight was staples like bread rice flour and pasta, and lots of vegetables. We'd also occasionally get very impractical donations (like one time we recieved almost a thousand banannas) and had to get creative cooking to preserve them to last longer. Lots of pickling, jams etc