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Name Your Poison

 


For reasons unknown to me, June 8th is Name Your Poison Day. While making the rounds of the usual “did you know about this holiday?” websites I discovered that no one seems to know the actual origin of the day. That’s odd. How do we know it’s really a holiday if no one can document its origins?

Perhaps it’s even a hoax. How would we know?

The poison du jour is AI, which is making it harder and harder to do online research or to tell truth from fiction. Examples:

  • Facebook is now flooding my feed with accounts and posts from “Howard County” and “Columbia” but from other states entirely.
  • When I search YouTube for current local stories these days, I routinely get substantial amounts of unrelated junk - - even if I put my search term in quotes. 
  • My realtor’s newsletter just recommended this house to me. See the problem?


What AI has meant in my daily life is less accuracy, more difficulty finding what I’m looking for, and an overall degradation in the quality of information. (See also: “Travel Choices for Out of Towners”.)

This is not a poison that I would pick if I were given any choice in the matter. Would you?


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  1. Julia A. McCreadyJune 8, 2026 at 4:07 AM

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