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。

On the twelfth of August, a lot of people looked up Altman on Google, and the first line they saw was: he is already dead.

Altman was not dead — nothing had happened to him.

That day he was fine, and at work at his own company.

Here is how it started.

Wikipedia has an entry for him, and anyone at all can edit Wikipedia.

That day someone opened his page and added a few lines.

Added a date of death, added a city of death, and added one more serious claim.

Not one line of it was true.

Forty-one minutes later, another editor noticed and deleted all of it.

Forty-one minutes, out of a whole day, is short.

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

Google did not verify it, and did not wait.

It put that death notice straight onto its own page.

So a lot of people searched, and the first thing they saw was his death.

Once it blew up, Google took it down.

Google said one thing, and that is the real point.

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

That is true — no Google employee did touch it.

But turn it around and it means: nobody wrote it, and nobody looked at it.

A stranger typed a few lines online, a machine took it as fact, and then told millions of people.

Whether or not a person has actually died, other places would carry other news.

But that machine saw it in one place, and that was enough.

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