Google AI was wrong!

Be careful when listening an AI.

TL:DR:

Google AI generated search gave me spectacularly wrong answer. Also, people in 1800s were smarter than us.

People were smarter:

My wife, a former English teacher, claims that people were smarter back in the 19th century. She presents Charles Dickens as evidence. Charles Dickens was an extremely popular and widely read author. Dickens’ writings were serialized in many newspapers, and readers eagerly  consumed each in installment. Charles Dickens was a rock star!

If you look at his writings you will find  complex sentence structure, with a large vocabulary, and many sophisticated cultural references, as compared to the writing we see today. Yet, everyday people were enthusiastic readers of his stories and books. Their language skills surpass ours, and so, my wife concludes, they were smarter.

For example, here is the very first sentence from Charles Dickens book “The Pickwick Papers”:

“The first ray of light which illuminates the gloom, and converts into a dazzling brilliancy that obscurity in which the earlier history of the public career of the immortal Pickwick would appear to be involved, is derived from the perusal of the following entry in the Transactions of the Pickwick Club, which the editor of these papers feels the highest pleasure in laying before his readers, as a proof of the careful attention, indefatigable assiduity, and nice discrimination, with which his search among the multifarious documents confided to him has been conducted.”

This was the popular writing of the 1800s!

Enter Google:

The only counter argument to my wife’s thesis I could offer was the thought that perhaps the literacy rates at the time were low, so while Dickens was popular, the popularity would only be among a small population. So I went to Google and asked: “what was the literacy rate in the US in 1890”. 

I read the first sentence of the AI generated answer, which said:

“The literacy rate in the United States in 1890 was 13% of the adult population.”

When I told my wife this “fact” - she just said “That’s wrong.”

If you look little closer at the screenshot below, you can see that she is right, as additional  conflicting answers are shown.

After a little bit of research, by simply following the links in the search results, I discovered where the number “13%” came from.  Turns out that the illiteracy (!!!) rate in the 1890s US was 13%. Literacy rate was on the 80% range, somewhat dependent on which part of the population you considered.

So, judging by their language skills, people in the 1800s were smarter.  On the other hand AI generated search results can be misleading.