Historical truth: InfluenceWatch vs. Google Gemini

InfluenceWatch (IW) is the Capital Research Center’s project to track the influencers who have and continue to shape American public policy. At present, we have nearly 16,000 profiles and more are added every week. IW also features extensive historical profiles covering the New Left that emerged in the 1960s, including domestic terror groups such as the Weather Underground.

Yesterday I was working on a report about the New Left and wanted to use a quote from the Weather Underground profile. The infamous quote was made in reference to the August 1969 Tate-LaBianca murders that were committed by the followers of cult leader Charles Manson:

Dig it, they murdered those pigs and then ate dinner at their dining table then stuck a fork in their bellies! Wild!

In the IW profile this quote is attributed to Weather Underground leader Bernardine Dohrn, alleged to have said it mere months after the murders took place. One can never be too careful with these things, so even though I wrote the profile (and repeated the attribution in a separate profile of Dohrn), I decided to double check before using it again.

I fed the quote into Gemini, Google’s artificial intelligence tool that now automatically pops up at the top of a search query. At this point I didn’t want to bias the response from the robot, so I provided only the quote and didn’t tell Gemini what to do with it.

This was Gemini’s initial reaction:

This quote is a famous and chilling statement made by Susan Atkins, a member of the Manson Family cult, regarding the 1969 Tate-LaBianca murders. She made this remark to her cellmate, Virginia Graham, while in jail, expressing excitement over the brutal killings. The murders were orchestrated by cult leader Charles Manson in an attempt to incite what he called “Helter Skelter”—a apocalyptic race war he believed was prophesied in secret codes within the Beatles’ White Album.

This is a hallucination, but you would need to know a bit about the Manson murders to spot the mistake. Tellingly, the lone Wikipedia profile source Gemini provided makes no reference at all to the quote.

Hoping to get Gemini to rethink the error of its ways, but still not wanting to tell it who I was looking for, I asked a cagey follow up question: “Wasn’t Atkins accused of being one of the murderers?”

Gemini answered correctly that Atkins was one of the convicted killers and then added background on the murders, still not acting as if it had botched the initial answer.

I presented the obvious problem with Gemini attributing the statement to Atkins: “Then why was she speaking in the third person to the cellmate? You may have misattributed this quote.”

This time, Gemini adjusted and pinned the quote on someone else . . . but still not Dohrn:

You are completely correct to question that, and I apologize for the misattribution. . . It was Ronnie Howard’s report of this conversation to jail authorities that ultimately gave the Los Angeles Police Department their first major break to solve the Tate-LaBianca murders. [emphasis original]

Gemini even provided two citations to supposedly back up the new claim, one from the New York Times. This was more hallucinations: neither of the sources mention the quote.

So, I tried a third time, this time painting an obvious bullseye on what I wanted so the artificial “intelligence” wouldn’t miss it: “Historian Arthur Eckstein attributes this quote to Bernadine Dohrn.”

Again, Gemini changed its mind:

You are absolutely right, and I completely missed the mark twice. Thank you for your patience and for bringing the proper historical accuracy to light.

This infamous quote belongs entirely to Bernardine Dohrn, the leader of the radical left-wing militant group the Weather Underground. [emphasis original]

The only citation used by Gemini this time goes to our InfluenceWatch profile of the Weather Underground, which in turn cites Eckstein, who did indeed get the attribution correct. We know this because Dohrn has publicly admitted saying it. There are multiple sources showing this, most notably a June 2009 interview with Dohrn on C-SPAN.

Why didn’t Gemini find any of these sources on the first and second attempts? Would it have ever gotten it correct if it hadn’t been spoon fed the answer?

A better question: Why trust Google with your history of the radical left when there’s InfluenceWatch?

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/historical-truth-influencewatch-vs-google-gemini/