Chatbots Are Leading Hikers Astray, With Dangerous Consequences

Outsourcing planning to AI can lead people to surrender their own critical thinking, which can have potentially deadly results in places like the backcountry. By the time the three hikers called for help from a rocky face on Mount Shasta in Northern California, they'd made a series of bad decisions . They didn't bring enough food, and they'd overestimated their fitness. Instead of turning back in late afternoon when they hadn't yet reached the top, they summited at 7:30 pm and had to descend in the dark. Their lack of preparation and poor planning, as they admitted later, came partly from relying on Google's artificial intelligence chatbot Gemini .