In quiet moments, you can almost hear the faint sizzling sound of AI corroding humanity’s capacity for inquiry and sustained, focused thought. The arguments against this—that the technology itself does not work very well, or at all; that the ability to reason things out on our own is actually both important for a healthy society and more or less the thing that makes us human—don’t seem to be working, and have barely registered. People ask chatbots or AI-larded search engines for answers to questions that chatbots inherently cannot understand, receive a confidently phrased but often luridly wrong result, and move on grateful for the convenience and exactly zero percent wiser for having done so. It is not just that the responses might be incorrect, although they really might be; it’s that asking the question at all seems only to make the answer recede further into abstraction. This is something that even the smartest people in the most specialized areas are experiencing, so you can only imagine how stupid the results might be when someone like me does something with it.
Here is an example of this. An online friend noted yesterday that Google’s search delivered some surprising and hard to explain results on the question of what Sam Presti’s name is. This would not seem to be much of a question at all, and the AI overview’s answer seemed self-evident. Sam Presti’s name, it said, is Sam Presti.
This seems obvious enough, and to the extent that there is anything about it that stands out as strange it is that the birthday assigned to Presti in the overview does not match the one attributed to him in a different automatically generated overview, which made him one year older.
This is not the sort of thing that you would necessarily want to see in your exceedingly general web search. It’s confusing and contradictory in a way that puts all the other results you’re seeing in doubt, but while Google searches did not always deliver results like this—until the introduction of AI to the search process, they hardly ever did—they have been messed up in this way for long enough that a regular user will just sort of tune it out. It’s the sort of calculation you make without even noticing that you’re making it, registering of some bit of rust on an important structure and then making the non-decision to keep it moving. Sam Presti is 47 or 48 years old, and he does not need this. A regular user of this technology, who would by now be used to this sort of dysfunction, will know to scroll down.
There are different questions there, and also different answers. Under the suggested question “what is Sam Presti’s real name” is a surprising answer, and one that contradicts both the AI overview at the top of the page and the fact that, when you read the name “Sam Presti” in the headline to this post, you knew exactly who I was talking about.
This is interesting! It is made more so by the fact that the sources cited below this result are Presti’s Wikipedia and Basketball-Reference pages, neither of which actually feature anything asserting that his name is actually Samuel Prestigiacomo, and also a 13-year-old blog post on the Daily Thunder website. That post, which was inspired by Eric Maynor’s unusual middle name, runs down the middle names of the players and coaches of the 2012–13 Thunder. Presti is last, and the post lists his name as “Sam Prestigiacomo,” adding “no joke, that’s Sam Presti’s actual name. I couldn’t find his middle name.” Nothing is linked, there; there is just the author—he will have to be unnamed, as the byline and lead art have rotted away—asserting that he or she is not joking.
A Google search for “Sam Prestigiacomo” offered no help, and in fact only raised other, unrelated questions.
But though they are not cited to bolster The Prestigiacomo Assertion and did not turn up in the search for what either is or isn’t Presti’s real name, there were some other sources attesting to the fact that Sam Presti’s name might not be Sam Presti. A 2009 story in The Oklahoman, headlined “Thunder GM Sam Presti Wired A Bit Differently” refers to Presti as “the man born Sam Prestigiacomo in Concord, Mass.” (It does not, sadly, specify in which year that happened.) There is also a year-old Reddit post in which someone who claimed to have delivered Presti’s mail for the USPS claimed that “a lot of his letters were labeled with that name.” (“They had to nerf his lastname,” a comment down the thread posits, “otherwise hed be cooler than he already is.”)
We were getting closer to an answer on the question of what Sam Presti’s name is, but there were no on-the-record comments from Presti addressing the issue, and web searches would or at any rate could take me no further. This is where Defector’s access to the Nexis research tool and database came in handy. And Nexis, thankfully, had public records that delivered an answer to the question that Google and its various proprietary summaries and suggestions could only smash into smaller and equally inscrutable sub-queries. It also had answers both to the question that Google couldn’t quite answer about the year in which Presti was born and the question that our lost Daily Thunder blogger couldn’t answer about what his middle name is. At this time, Defector is now prepared to exclusively release this information:
So let this be the end of it. Not of the web’s rotting information infrastructure, or to the problem that all of that is getting worse more or less due to some extremely cynical business decisions made by the corporations that own and operate that infrastructure. Also this is not the end to the escalating and terrifying sense of very basic things slipping ever further out and into unknowability in a global sense. But let this be the end, then, to the question that all of America has been asking without any satisfying answer, the question of what Sam Presti’s name is: his name is Samuel Clay Prestigiacomo, and he was born in 1976. This is not an answer to the question of why he shortened that magnificent last name; that is Presti’s to give. But, given the broader circumstances, a definitive answer re: what his name feels like a success in its own right.
h/t Bluesky users @gfunksupreme and @MisterNov3mber