I found out about my death the way everybody finds out everything: from Google.
What happened was, I Googled my name ("Dave Barry") and what popped up was something called “Google AI Overview.” This is a summary of the search results created by Artificial Intelligence, the revolutionary world-changing computer tool that has made it possible for college students to cheat more efficiently than ever before.
The Google AI Overview for my name consisted of some basic biographical information about me, along with a list of questions under the heading "People also ask." This was the first question:
As you might imagine I was curious to find out what happened to me, so I clicked on that question. This was the answer:
Give Google AI credit for what it got right: That is, in fact, a picture of me, and I did, in fact, win a Pulitzer Prize (trust me, I'm just as shocked as you are). But to the best of my knowledge, I did not pass away last November 20. That is not just my opinion. In recent months I have been examined by two different licensed physicians, and if I had been dead, I'm pretty sure at least one of them would have mentioned it. ("Dave, your pulse is zero, and your blood pressure is zero over zero. I'm going to try your other arm, but frankly at this point I'm concerned.")
Fortunately, Google AI Overview has a mechanism whereby if you have an issue with something, you can submit feedback. So I submitted this:
I'll be honest: When I submitted this feedback, I did not expect much in the way of a response. Google is a huge company with a vast network of computers processing more than a billion trilobites of data every second, which is all the more impressive when we consider the fact that a trilobite is a marine creature that became extinct 250 million years ago, which I think we can all agree is a good thing because it looked like a giant cockroach with way too many legs:
Getty Images
So I didn't expect that Google, what with all it has on its plate, would have time to respond to my issue about not being dead. But I was wrong. Shortly after I submitted my feedback, the "People also ask" part of my AI Overview was changed. That was the good news. The bad news was, it was changed to this:
Yes. Google AI Overview kept the only statement I objected to — specifically, that I was dead — and removed the accurate statements. It apparently replaced these with information about a completely different Dave Barry, a political activist from Dorchester who died in 2016.
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