What Happened to Dave Barry?

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Originally published at: What Happened to Dave Barry? - TidBITS

Who among us has not Googled themselves to see how we’re represented online? When humor columnist Dave Barry did that recently, he was presented with one of Google’s “People also ask” questions: “What happened to Dave Barry?” Curious, he clicked it and went down a maze of twisty little AI answers, all different and many inaccurate. In the first, he had passed away from cancer, but in later answers, it became clear that he was being confused with another Dave Barry from Dorchester, MA.

Dave Barry's original search results

Barry’s Death by AI post captures this absurdity in his inimitable style. (I’m unreasonably amused by his description of Google as “a huge company with a vast network of computers processing more than a billion trilobites of data every second.”) His attempts to submit corrections were met by Google’s feedback assistant seemingly translating his corrections into Latvian, parsing them in English, and then throwing up its virtual hands in confusion.

Eventually, though, Google managed to align its AI with reality. Now, when I ask Google that question, I get something along these lines.

Dave Barry in Google AI OverviewThe only confusion involved was generated by Google itself.

After conducting extensive research for “AI Answer Engines Are Worth Trying” (17 April 2025), I was curious to see how ChatGPT, Claude, Google’s own Gemini, Perplexity, and You.com would answer the question. Spoiler: they all did fine, though the answers from Claude and You.com were once again the weakest.

Dave Barry in ChatGPTChatGPT Dave Barry in ClaudeClaude Dave Barry in GeminiGemini Dave Barry in PerplexityPerplexity Dave Barry in You.comYou.com

Having Google declare you dead might be a gift for a professional humor columnist, but these AI Overview errors highlight how dedicated AI answer engines can deliver more accurate results.

I don’t know why Google’s AI Overview is so much worse than Gemini, but I suspect it has to do with scalability and response time. When I asked, “What happened to Adam Engst?” all the AI answer engines responded correctly but took 3–15 seconds to start returning information. Given the exponentially larger number of queries that Google fields and its desire to do so nearly instantly (0.19 seconds for that query), you can see why Google might be willing to sacrifice AI accuracy for speed.

By the way, in the responses to my navel-gazing curiosity, Perplexity earned bonus points for acknowledging my Internet doppleganger, who’s a lawyer in Seattle, while Claude lost points for being by far the slowest and for providing last year’s information instead of something more recent.

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My theory is that every time Dave Barry changed the status to “I’m alive”, friends & family of the deceased Dave Barry sent in a correction to set the record straight.

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Isn’t it strange that almost every article starts with ‘still alive?’ Pretty sure that’s not the first thing it would say about Adam, me, or anyone other than Elvis.

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About 6 weeks ago, in preparing for a trivia night, I wanted to confirm my understanding of which machines comprise the six simple machines. I entered “What are the six simple machines” into the search engine, and the AI overview returned with: “The four simple machines are the lever, the wheel, the pulley, and the wedge” (thereby completely ignoring the screw and the inclined plane, and also the axle part of the wheel).

Directly underneath was a link to the wikipedia entry on the six simple machines which listed them on the page.

So, AI, huh? Yeah nah.

(For those interested, the question was: “For half a point each, name four of the six simple machines as defined by Renaissance scientists”)

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In Dave Barry’s case, no, since he’s in his late 70s and although he’s still active, he’s far less in the public eye than he was before he stopped writing the weekly column. The phrasing of the question presupposes that the person asking doesn’t know if the subject is alive or at least actively working.

When I asked, “What happened to Adam Engst?” none of the responses commented that I was still alive, but I’m 20 years younger and publishing regularly.

It’s also interesting that the Google AI Overview seems to vary quite widely. When I asked it about the six simple machines, it got the answer right. (As did ChatGPT.) But Dave Barry’s experience matches yours in that the answers seem to change.

I wonder if Google is somehow evaluating the accuracy of the answers after the fact, such that the answer to any given question will increasingly approach correctness over time.

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Dave Barry has a piece in the latest AARP magazine about why Boomers still love to dance, much to the chagrin of their children. Classic.

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These AI summaries are an unmitigated disaster. I had a good laugh several weeks ago because I wrote the only calibration instructions available online (that I know of) for a vintage color meter and I posted them to two or three sites.

So, I searched for calibration info and the “summary” was completely polluted by information from an unrelated source that was obviously wrong. Result: wrong summary.

Now, if evaluating the reliability of a piece of information you read somewhere can be complicated, imagine the “AI fog” confusing things even further!

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Never searched for myself. I watched the movie based on a Barry book today though (Big Trouble). Rather absurd and good though.

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This is all there is to say.

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Thank you for posting that. Reading Barry’s account of AI search feels just a touch Douglas Adams adjacent. :grinning:

Entirely possible, but that only highlights a major problem beyond even AI: Multiple data sets with the same name or title.

AI will probably always lack the Gatekeeper function that is so critical to accurate data. We can continue to refine and fiddle and tweak it, but that feels like chasing a stampeding herd of animals vs. building a structured, intentional framework of information.

Numerous examples of AI search leave me with a sort of mental picture that resembles: Wikipedia + AI search = chaotic data. This means, when you source anything that is online and perhaps prioritize “current” or “recent” sources along with with response time, what are your results?

What would stop an individual or organization from flooding the “source pool” with a certain message or data set that then becomes “current” and thus alters any results.

For years I have referred to AI as “artificial incompetence”, which may be a touch harsh but thus far it has held true. You can have all the Intelligence in the universe while still lacking Maturity or Understanding.

Not trying to be a tech-NIMBY but I always urge caution with any technology. Something most businesses and political groups rarely employ in their race to sell the latest thing.

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Speaking of what happened to Dave Barry, Adam mentioned Barry’s 1997 book, “Dave Barry in Cyberspace,” a few months ago, and it sounded so intriguing (I’m a huge Barry fan) I bought a cheap (at the time) paperback from Amazon.

https://www.amazon.com/Dave-Barry-Cyberspace/dp/0449912302

It is a hilarious book and I think it’s even better 30 years later because it brings back so many memories of how primitive computers were in the 1990s. Lots of snarky fun!

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I’d never heard that before - what a great song (and a way to think).

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One of my great claims to fame is that I successfully called into a radio show to talk to Dave Barry back in the 90s. One of my heroes. He did fade away for many years after his divorce, but he’s been back in the swing of things a bit more lately. He plays in a band with Steven King, so I’m surprised the AIs didn’t say King killed him in some evil way!

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Remember the old sci-fi TV shows, where, when the super-intelligent electronic brain machine was faced with a logical-factual paradox, it would explode in a shower of sparks?

Something along the lines of, “Dave Barry died, but Dave Barry is still alive.”

Zap! BOOM!

Then, once we all bought real computers and set them on our desks and started using them to write memos and add up our monthly budgets, we realized how silly those old sci-fi depictions were.

Well, we’re making great progress toward turning our practical budgeting and memo-writing tools into hapless b-movie automatons.

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I heard it first just a couple years ago when I started playing with a band that does that song. It made me a Willie Nelson fan :-)