What's in a Drink?

[setsuled]

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Well, AI is wrong again, and about Indiana Jones again. After writing about The Last Crusade yesterday, I went to lunch and afterwards I planned to buy a bottle of bourbon. I got to wondering what Indy was drinking in the Cairo bar scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. I didn't know but for some reason I felt sure it was a bourbon. So I asked Google and here's the answer I received:



Okay, right of the bat, there are some problems with this response. Saying it's not a "specific" bourbon implies there is merely no brand indicated but then it says, "but rather" implying he drinks no bourbon at all. Then it says it's Scotch whisky from a bottle labelled "Belle of Lincoln", a variety produced by Jack Daniel's. Jack Daniel's is a very famous American distillery that has historically disliked being called a bourbon (though it fits the legal definition of "bourbon" despite not being produced in the Bourbon region of Kentucky). One thing it's definitely not, though, is a scotch, that is Scottish, whisky.

A few centimeters below the AI response is a link to an Indiana Jones forum where people have investigated this question and have turned up this production still:



And this quote from the screenplay:

A dark, smoke-filled den on iniquity. The patrons, almost all
fearsome Arabs, sit in small shadowy groups around the room.
Indy stands at the bar finishing off a fifth of bourbon. He
is drunk. The ARAB BARTENDER places a new bottle of expensive
bourbon in front of him.

Although the label is generally turned away from the viewer in the film, you can still plainly see it once in the scene embedded above.



Although the AI says the "iconic 'Belle of Lincoln' bottle is a replica prop, not a real brand," Belle of Lincoln was quite real. Lincoln county, by the way, is located in Tennessee, not in Scotland.

Again, the remarkable thing to me isn't just that the AI is wrong but that it's stridently wrong. It seems extremely confident that Indiana Jones is shown to drink scotch and not bourbon.

My suspicion is that its source is this web site article in which staff writers are asked to offer their opinions on what the favourite drinks of various famous movie characters are. Under Indiana Jones, the writers propose three different scotch brands.



I think the AI assumed that this merchant web site with its paid writers was surely better informed than a bunch of anonymous joes on a web site forum. The AI isn't hip to what most of us who have been using the internet for a long time know, that paid shill content is very often of shoddier quality than stuff people just post for free. We've somehow gotten to the point where Wikipedia is a more reliable source than news and corporate funded shopping sites. People who are passionate enough to pursue their interests for free have been outpacing people who've been paid to do something they're not really interested in for years. Maybe the reason AI is making so many mistakes is that it's been taught about a world that corporations want to exist rather that one that actually does.