Teenage AI Meat Proxy Stranded on “Widowmaker” Mountain After Following AI Instructions
Futurism ·
"Claude has never been in that specific area, has never been on that route, and has never been in the outdoors." The post Teenage AI Meat Proxy Stranded on “Widowmaker” Mountain After Following AI Instructions appeared first on Futurism .
Hikers keep getting stranded after consulting AI chatbots for potentially life-saving — or life-threatening — advice.
Just last month, three outdoor enthusiasts had to be rescued by Forest Service rangers in California’s Cascade Range after Google’s AI advised them to “bring far less food and water than their group required,” turning their planned eight-hour ascent into a “multi day ordeal.”
Yet despite officials pleading with the public not to take the advice of hallucinating large language models, their warnings keep falling on deaf ears.
Most recently, a 16-year-old boy had to be rescued from the base of a massive and steep rock formation, ironically named the “Widowmaker,” on British Columbia’s Crown Mountain. As CTV News reports , the teenager took a gondola up to an altitude of over 4,000 feet to the top of Grouse Mountain — only for Anthropic’s Claude AI chatbot to lead him off the trail route on his way back down.
The boy was in serious danger, but fortunately had at least one bright idea during his adventure: calling in for help after getting stuck.
“A fall would have resulted in significant injury or potentially death,” North Shore Rescue search manager Paul Markey told CTV News .
Two rescuers had to lower themselves down since the helicopter was unable to get any closer to the Widowmaker’s steep vertical wall.
“When on the ground, the crew established an anchor, and one member was belayed to the subject,” a North Shore Rescue task debrief reads. “There, the member established additional protection and was able to move the subject to a suitable extraction point.”
Markey took the opportunity to once again implore the public not to trust AI chatbots like Claude to provide this type of information.
“Claude has never been in that specific area, has never been on that route, and has never been in the outdoors — do your own research and gain your own knowledge of the area and supplement it with training and navigation,” he told CTV News .
More on AI: Hikers Rescued After Using Google AI to Plan Disastrous Trip
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