For Words of the Day, “expert,” I wanted to cite to five-time Nebula-, five-time Hugo Award winner Ursula Le Guin, in her The Lathe of Heaven, from which I felt sure the passage “Mr. Orr is an expert in tangibles” had come to mind, as such passages do. Out of habit, I searched on Google to verify the quote, as one does, or did, and received the following AI View, which I have helpfully annotated. Spoiler: Google’s AI gets everything — well, almost everything — wrong, butchering Le Guin’s entire oeuvre, both in sourcing and interpretation, all the while with an air of confident authority and smooth competence. It is to vomit. Here is a screen shot:
[1] This is one thing Google gets right: I had slightly misremembered Le Guin’s text. Which is why I did the search, to verify the cite and link to the source.
[2] Google butchers the context of the quote. The quote is “Mr. Orr is expert with tangibles.” Orr is not “an expert” or “the expert.” “Expert” here is an adjective, not a noun, which makes me wonder how enshittified Google’s tokenizer already is.
[3] The link is to an article at the National Endowment for the Humanities by Julie Phillips, who is “working on a biography of Ursula k. Le Guin” (published April 2, 2026). I can’t find any reviews of the biography, but the article is good, and Phillips has written other work on Le Guin. This is the other thing Google gets right. Unfortunately, I had to spend ten minutes digging this out, because otherwise I’d have to take Google’s AI Spew on authority (pas si bete). Google’s almost a five trillion-doller company. Why do they never explain their evidence or reasoning?
[4] “Famously” my sweet Aunt Fanny. The word “tangible” does not appear in The Left Hand of Darkness at all. Evidence:
There is only one hit on “tangible,” and that is inside the full word, “intangible.” (Perhaps this illustrates AI’s problem with negation, or but not?)
[5] The sourcing, hilariously, is Il Mondo di Rocannon (!), a wonderful book, but the wrong book, just as The Left Hand of Darkness is also a wonderful book, just not one with Mr. Orr in it (or Mr. Ether, for that matter):
[6] I have no idea what “grounding foil” would be (though I imagine copper would function better than aluminum). I don’t have time hose out this particular example of Augean coprography, but please take my word as a Le Guin fan and a former humanities major: It’s bullshit all the way down. (At the highest level, Obsle, Ai, and the oddly unmentioned second protagonist, Estraven, besides being fully rounded characters, are also representatives of systems, far more important than the “practical, gritty reality of everyday politics,” which, even if it were an accurate characterization of Obsle, is prose Le Guin would sooner have died than written. One error of fact: The Ekumen is not an “alliance.” Le Guin describes it as follows:
In my first three sf novels there is a League of Worlds, vaguely embracing known planets in our local bit of the local galaxy, including Earth. This rather suddenly morphs into the Ekumen, a non-directive, information-gathering consortium of worlds, which occasionally disobeys its own directive to be non-directive. I had met the Greek word meaning household, oikumene, as in ecumenical, in one of my father’s anthropology books, and remembered it when I needed a word that might imply a still wider humanity spread out from one original hearth. I spelled it Ekumen. If you write science fiction you can spell things the way you like, sometimes.
If you think an “alliance” is a “a non-directive, information-gathering consortium,” then I have an ETF of a bridge I’d like to sell you for just a few bitcoin. (UPDATE There’s also that “Skea” (italics in “original’ thing; there is no “later version” of any of these novels that I know of, but rather than nail the reference, I think I’ll just go lie down. (UPDATE And how could I miss that Obsle is not the Prime Minister of Karhide — that would be Tibe, after Estraven’s downfall — but a Commensal in Orgoreyn, rival to Karhide. Sheesh)).
[7] The sourcing, besides — how droll — our old friend, Il Mondo di Rocannon, is also The Dispossessed, another wonderful book in which Mr. Orr does not appear, expert in tangibles or no:
[8] Is this product placement for Goodreads and Amazon? Because if it isn’t, it will be. Otherwise, I’d have to believe that this is the best Google can do.
What really frosts me — besides the picture of some credulous teenager turning this slop in for an assignment — is that Silicon Valley Tech Lords are supposed to be science fiction fans. Yet here the entire life’s work of a writer who won both the Nebula Award and the Hugo award five (5) times is completely butchered. Wrong sourcing, wrong quotes, wrong facts, wrong interpretations. It’s like watching that robot kick a five-year-old in the stomach the other day. What’s wrong with these people?
NOTES
I’m pleased with “AI Spew.” I hope it propagates.