Those concerned for comic book legend Stan Lee got the shock of a lifetime when they asked Apple‘s digital assistant Siri how he was doing recently. The answer was, uh… Not good.
Of course, Mr Lee is still very much alive, but for a brief moment, those asking about him received the response, “Stan Lee died on July 2, 2018” from Siri. While you might be quick to blame some blundering tech for the misinformation, it was actually a Wiki user’s fault.
As it turns out, this Wiki user, named “&beer&love“, changed Lee’s Wiki data to add a “date of death”, but as you can probably guess, completely dicked it up because, you know, he’s not fucking dead. Because Siri automatically pulls data from these pages, the incorrect information about his death was served for a brief amount of time to anyone inquiring. Awkward.
Writer Sean O’Connell shared his own experience with the bung information in a CinemaBlend post describing how he and his teenage son asked Siri how Lee was doing on their way home from a screening of Ant-Man and the Wasp. Shocked, they looked for news about his death but obviously found nothing.
The page in question has since been changed back to its original state and the user responsible for the amendment has had their page deleted. If you take anything away from this yarn, it should be that this technology is nowhere near ready enough to be a 100 per cent reliable assistant.
