With "intelligence" like this, who needs stupidity?

I should have come to expect it by now, but I can still be surprised sometimes at how very bad Fake Intelligence software is at answering straightforward "no-brainer" questions that ought to be well within the reach of a mindless computer program. For example, I recently posted in "The unfathomable stupidity of Fake Intelligence" about how an FI "analyzed" an unrhymed poem of 10 lines by saying that it had eight lines and a specific rhyme scheme.

Today the Unfathomable Stupidity struck again.

In my "Was I not Gil Vas?" dream, there was the idea that the title character was one of two people with the Russian initials ГВ, or GV in English transliteration, but I couldn't remember the second person's name. Today I wondered if there were any famous Russians with those initials, and since that's not the sort of thing that's easy to look up by ordinary methods, I resorted to consulting an FI. It obligingly said, "Here are some of the most well-known Russians whose initials are Г. В. (G.V.), across different fields" and gave me this list:

• Georgy Malenkov
• Gennady Zyuganov
• Gavriil Derzhavin
• Vasily Zhukovsky
• Georgy Voronoy
• Vladimir Vernadsky
• Galina Vishnevskaya
• Georgy Schchedrovitsky
• G. W. F. Hegel

Nine names, of which only two (22%) meet the extremely simple criteria I specified!

The FI provided parenthetical explanations for two of its incorrect answers. Hegel, it said was a "special case (very famous initials, though not Russian by nationality), often cited in Russian contexts as "Г.В.Ф. Ге́гель," and hugely influential in Russian intellectual history." Okay, I guess I can see that, though one wouldn't ordinarily say that Hegel's initials were GW. For Zhukovsky, it explained:

Note: Not actually Г.В., but often mistakenly grouped here -- he’s important as a literary contemporary and mentor to Pushkin.

Yes, I'm sure that's a very common mistake. The fact that Zhukovsky was an important literary contemporary of Pushkin would naturally lead people to misremember his name as Gasily Vukovsky. Who among us hasn't made a careless error like that?

When I spelled out as explicitly as possible that the first name must begin with G and the last name must begin with V, it gave me a new list of names, of which only 56% had the initials I specified. Finally, after a third attempt to make it "understand" this very simple concept, it did provide a list of all-GV names (just a subset of the second list).

Thinking I had finally succeeded in making the obtuse software "understand" what I wanted, I proceeded to ask it for a list of Russians whose first name and patronymic (Russian "middle name") began with G and V respectively, since that's actually a more common way for initials to be used in Russian -- e.g., where Westerners usually say Vladimir Lenin, Russians more usually call him V. I. Lenin. Having "learned" nothing from our exchange, the FI immediately reverted to its original stupidity and listed 10 names, only two of which (20%) had the correct initials.

There are people who use Fake Intelligence for everything. I don't know how they can stand it. Any human employee who made mistakes like this would be fired immediately and possibly encouraged to apply for intellectual disability benefits.

After mentioning Lenin above, I decided to look at his Russian Wikipedia article to confirm that he would be called V. I. more often than Vladimir -- but of course an article about Lenin mostly just calls him Lenin. Scrolling through the article, though, I happened to find by chance an example of exactly what I had been trying in vain to winkle out of the FI: a mention of Plekhanov, the father of Russian Marxism, referred to in the article as Г. В. Плеханов -- a very famous Russian with the desired initials, but passed up by the FI in favor of people like G. A. Potemkin. Serendipity 1, Fake Intelligence 0.

To date, I have gotten exactly one useful answer from an FI. When I couldn't remember which 1990s popular science book had quoted the first four lines of Robert Frost's "Fire and Ice," a Fake Intelligence successfully tracked it down for me. (See "That old 'Fire and Ice' sync") Later, when I was trying to find the 20th-century pop-witchcraft book that had used the magic word naha-rana-hara as part of an incantation for making things grow -- it had popped into my head while I was watering my plants, piquing my idle curiosity -- it sent me barking up the wrong tree with Buckland's Complete Book of Witchcraft. I keep trying it again from time to time, encouraged by that one notable success, but everything since then has been a train wreck.