AI is great, except when it gets everything wrong all the time

March 16, 2026 — 5:00am

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I had been using AI very occasionally for a while – one of the free versions. I hated using it – found it fairly useless. Then, recently, persuaded by friends, I buckled and paid for a pro version.

This was definitely better. On some subjects, it provided detailed, worked-through information, clearly presented. I know nothing about gardens, but when my son found something in a flower pot and Google couldn’t tell me what it was I fed a description into AI. Immediately, the right answer.

Shortly after that, I found myself unable to remember the name of a band I had listened to recently. I only knew a song or two, vaguely. I did, though, have some good details, which I fed into AI: where they were from, how many people were in the band, the type of name they had. The AI failed.

So I tried again on Google – and this time got an answer. Then I went back to AI, gave it the name (Haute & Freddy) and asked why it had not been able to find it. It told me this was natural for an obscure band without a large internet presence. Which would have been a good response – except the band had been covered in the press, including Rolling Stone. I told AI this. It conceded the point. Then it explained that, in fact, the problem had been with my........

© The Age