谷歌告诉几百万人：Sam Altman 死了。消息来自维基百科上一次只存在了四十一分钟的篡改。

The result first, then how it happened.

On the twelfth of August, Google told a lot of people: Sam Altman is dead.

Sam Altman was not dead — nothing had happened to him at all.

He was fine, and that day he was at work at his company.

So why did Google say that?

To explain it, we first need to look at a website called Wikipedia.

This website has things about a great many well-known people.

What is unusual about it: anyone can go in and change it.

You can change it, I can change it, anyone else can too.

Once you have changed it, other people can see it immediately.

On the twelfth of August, someone opened Sam Altman’s page.

On it, they wrote a few lines.

They wrote which day Sam Altman had died.

They wrote which city Sam Altman had died in.

They also wrote one worse line.

Not one line of it was true.

Not one word.

Forty-one minutes later, someone else saw it and took those lines away.

Forty-one minutes.

A day has more than one thousand four hundred minutes.

This was only forty-one of them.

But within those forty-one minutes, Google saw it.

Google saw it and believed it, and treated it as true.

Google put this on its own page.

So that day, a lot of people looked up Sam Altman on Google, and the first line was: he is dead.

Afterwards everyone said it was wrong, and only then did Google take it away.

Google also said one thing, and this is the important part.

Google said: this was not changed by our own people.

That is true.

No Google person really did go and change it.

But precisely because of that, this is worth thinking about.

Nobody wrote it, and nobody looked at it — not one person.

A stranger wrote one line online, a machine believed it, and told a great many people.

Whether or not a person has died, other places would certainly have something to say.

But that machine saw it, and took it as true.

Think about it: of the things you believe today, how many has somebody actually checked for you?