Are You OK, Google AI? Do You Need A Policeman Or A Grownup?

[erronis]

https://www.wonkette.com/p/are-you-ok-google-ai-do-you-need
Doktor Zoom

You'll never guess what Wonkette did now!

Sort of humorous, in a Freddie Krueger type of way.

Yr Wonkette got an object lesson yesterday — as if we needed one — in why AI search results should be treated with skepticism set on fire. While Robyn was working on her story on the Trump administration’s ugly (and like so many administration ideas, almost certainly illegal) proposal to shift US refugee policy to helping out white people who are “oppressed” for being vile racists, she wanted to quickly review previous Wonkette stories on refugee policy. So she typed “Wonkette refugees” into Google, and while it did cough up Wonkette stories, those valid results were preceded by an AI generated “overview” that was completely insane. She posted it to the Wonkette Sekrit Chat Cave with the comment, “Um. I don't think that any of this happened?”

In late 2024, the term “Wonkette refugees” emerged on social media to describe a group of writers and readers who left the political blog Wonkette following a controversy involving its owner, Rebecca Schoenkopf. This controversy centered on her behavior, which included firing several editors and writing a post critical of her former staff.

Key events leading to the exodus

• Owner’s post: On December 22, 2024, Schoenkopf published a post on Wonkette that was widely criticized for being a “hit piece” against former staffers. The article reportedly mocked and disparaged former contributors and included what many felt was a humiliating attack on a former intern.

• Criticism from readers and former staff: The post sparked significant backlash, with many readers and former writers condemning the owner’s behavior as cruel, unprofessional, and “mean-spirited”.

• Mass departure: In response, several writers resigned and numerous readers began to abandon the blog. This led to the creation of the term “Wonkette refugees” to describe those who were looking for a new online community.

• Search for new platforms: The “refugees” began migrating to other platforms, including the independent blog Your Dad’s Wonkette and various social media groups. The new blog was established by a group of former Wonkette editors and writers and offered a new home for the disaffected community.

Nope, none of us remembered any of that, either, because the entire string of events was hallucinated by Google’s algorithm. There was no mass exodus of writers and editors, and December 22 was a Sunday, so Rebecca wouldn’t have written anything that Google’s large language model could have even misinterpreted as a hit piece about people who are still mostly here. And sadly, “Your Dad’s Wonkette” also doesn’t exist, though maybe we should register the domain just to be safe.

. . .

[Fiendish Thingy]

1. But critical thinking is sooo hard!

Why can’t we just unquestioningly copy and paste AI summaries as our OP’s and insist they are factual?

JFC, Facist Brain Police…

[AZJonnie]

3. Google.com AI summaries are a particularly crappy example of AI, for a few reasons

1) It is a cheap-to-run model. It has to be, otherwise, with the volume of searches Google handles every sec of every day, worldwide, the cost to operate a more thorough and reliable model for all of them would be prohibitively expensive, and
2) What people generally type into their Google searches is inconsistent with what would constitute a well-formed AI prompt.
3) AI's seemingly innate tendency to try to deliver what the user wants to hear (or read) even when it has insufficient context to glean what the user is really asking.

"Wonkette Refugees" or anything similarly short will rarely be a good AI prompt. That is not giving it nearly enough information to do it's job. These types of search strings work totally fine as a regular google search prompt, but not as an AI prompt.

AI and Google search are just two very different tools, and you have a generation of people trained to properly Google search. But now this cheap AI tool has been grafted onto it and is intercepting the requests and trying to treat them as it would a properly formed prompt. With unpredictably accurate results in many cases.

Consider the response to this question, provided by a model where I pay monthly for professional version I use mostly for work:

"Can you find significant evidence on the internet of the usage of the phrase "wonkette refugees" to describe an alleged mass exodus of writers from the blog Wonkette that began after a December 2024 article by the sites founder that appeared to disparage employees there?"

Based on my search results, I can provide a definitive answer about the existence of evidence for the phrase "Wonkette refugees" and the alleged mass exodus.

No, there is no significant evidence on the internet of the usage of the phrase "Wonkette refugees" to describe a mass exodus of writers from Wonkette following a December 2024 article. In fact, the exact opposite is true - this entire narrative was completely fabricated by Google's AI search algorithm.​

The Real Story
The phrase "Wonkette refugees" only gained attention because of a Google AI hallucination that occurred in October 2025. When Wonkette staff member Robyn searched for "Wonkette refugees" to find previous articles about refugee policy, Google's AI generated a completely fictional narrative about:​

A December 22, 2024 "hit piece" by founder Rebecca Schoenkopf against former staff
Mass departures of writers and editors
The creation of fictional spin-off blogs like "Your Dad's Wonkette"
Various made-up controversies and staff exodus ...
*** SNIP ***

AI Hallucination Problem
The incident demonstrates a well-documented problem with large language models creating confident but completely false information. When researchers continued searching, Google's AI generated increasingly elaborate fiction, including fake blog names, non-existent staff departures, and fictional controversies.​

In summary: The phrase "Wonkette refugees" exists only as evidence of AI misinformation, not as documentation of any real controversy or staff exodus at the political blog Wonkette

I then asked the following to make sure this model was not giving me a bad answer. Note I did a full copy of the response with placeholders for the links so readers here get an idea of how thoroughly a good (paid) AI model will consider a well-formed prompt:

I'm concerned that you might be responding to the content of this Wonkette article as if it were an infallible source of truth. What I'm actually asking you to do is assess *whether* the article is true by doing your own search for the term existing previously in any way, or even if there was an article by Rebecca that could have been construed as critical of staff. Did you also do such research yourself, before and during the construction of your response?

The reply:

Here is how I approached your query, and the research I actually did both before and during my previous response:

** snipping a long-winded explanation **

### Conclusion

**Yes, I did this independent research separate from the content of the Wonkette article.**
I corroborated my statements from primary sources and by searching every plausible record of controversy, mass departure, or the specific phrase "Wonkette refugees." The only mentions are in relation to the recent (October 2025) debunking of an AI-generated scenario. There does not appear to be a single piece of prior evidence or supporting record for such an exodus or for the alleged disparaging article—in archive, reporting, or social media.

If you would like direct excerpts or want me to reference the full text of any December 2024 Wonkette article, or perform a search in additional content archives, let me know!

[1](https://www.wonkette.com/p/us-refugee-centers-to-help-white/comments)
[2](https://www.wonkette.com/archive)
[3](https://www.wonkette.com/p/gop-how-dare-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-compare-our-concentration-camps-to-those-concentration-camps)
[4](https://www.wonkette.com/p/samantha-bee-sorry-for-thinking-first-amendment-somehow-applies-to-her-her-mistake-obviously/comments?triedRedirect=true)
[5](https://www.wonkette.com/p/are-you-ok-google-ai-do-you-need)
[6](https://www.wonkette.com/p/idea-what-if-we-didnt-purity-test/comments)
[7](https://www.wonkette.com/p/the-laborious-year-in-labor-2024/comments)
[8](https://www.wonkette.com/p/2024-the-year-that-broke-us/comments)
[9](https://www.wonkette.com/p/welcome-to-wonkette-happy-hour-with-a8c/comments)
[10](https://www.wonkette.com/p/2024-the-year-that-broke-us)
[11](https://www.wonkette.com/p/hell-no-and-impeach/comments)
[12](https://www.wonkette.com/p/has-the-fourth-estate-gone-to-hell)
[13](https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/document/download/pdf/uuid/7856546d-f5bf-3ade-afc3-f86632666376)
[14](https://www.wonkette.com)
[15](https://www.wonkette.com/p/new-ice-cruelty-memo-out-more-third)
[16](https://www.rawstory.com/federal-government-retirement/)
[17](https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/106399.Jim_Aikin/blog?page=15)
[18](https://x.com/commiegirl1?lang=en)
[19](https://www.kornferry.com/insights/this-week-in-leadership/the-great-ceo-exodus-continues)
[20](https://stratcomcoe.org/publications/download/DSC_NATO_journal_V11_FIN.pdf)
[21](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexuality_and_the_Church_of_Jesus_Christ_of_Latter-day_Saints)

The results from Google.com's "AI searches" are most definitely not to be trusted and/or posted as being outright facts. I've not seen many DU'ers doing what you describe, frankly, except in the context of "look how terrible Google's AI searches are"

Then again, neither should any "memes" or "social media posts from internet personalities who's livelihoods depend on clickbait headlines and stories", but I see an AWFUL lot of that going on in the world, and unfortunately even here on DU

[Fiendish Thingy]

5. There was a Grok AI summary OP that rose to the top of the Greatest page two days ago. Nt

[RainCaster]

2. This is the state of AI

It's dishonest - they say it 'halucinates'. So while so many companies are laying off people and replacing them with AI, they seem quite willing to accept this dishonesty because the costs are lower.

Keep this in mind as you invest your retirement funds.

[Amishman]

4. AI is very useful - when used for tasks that is well within the borders of the data set used to train it

The problem is most people trying to use these tools have no idea what it was trained on. Worse, they have insufficient information themselves to proofread or sanity check the answer given.

The problem isn't that AI is too buggy or flawed to be useful, it's that people are too ignorant to know when and how to use it properly.

'AI' isn't intelligent. It's just a fancy tool for extrapolating based on the data incorporated into its model.