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From: George J. Dance@novabbs.com (George J. Dance)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.poems
Subject: Google AI on AE
Date: Thu, 8 May 2025 15:03:37 +0000
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Google has added Generative AI to its searches. Now, when one does a
search, one gets an "AI overview" at the top of the search results. How
reliable is it? I got an indication of that today.

I am going over Penny's Blog, assigning the poems to centuries. Normally
that is easy enough; one can find the century by date of publication or,
failing that, the years of the author's life. Today , though, I ran into
George Russell's poem "Winter" which could have been either 19th or 20th
century (since he published poetry in both); and the book referenced was
no help, as it was his Collected Poems.

So I did a quick search on google ("winter by poet ae written when") and
got back this answer:

'The poet AE, who is George William Russell, did not write a poem titled
"Winter". The poem "Winter" is a well-known work by Iranian poet Mehdi
Akhavan Sales, published in 1956. A.E. Housman, another poet with the
initials A.E., was known for his "A Shropshire Lad" collection, not a
poem titled "Winter".'

https://www.google.com/search?q=winter+by+poet+AE+written+when&sca_esv=c9cf64c8cfd6b22d&sxsrf=AHTn8zq18IU0o0Et3PAFlrge9EwLEx3EWw%3A1746709970071&ei=0q0caNSVBOj9ptQP0_al4Ag&ved=0ahUKEwjUxqra-ZONAxXovokEHVN7CYwQ4dUDCBA&uact=5&oq=winter+by+poet+AE+written+when&gs_lp=Egxnd3Mtd2l6LXNlcnAiHndpbnRlciBieSBwb2V0IEFFIHdyaXR0ZW4gd2hlbjIIEAAYgAQYogQyCBAAGIAEGKIEMggQABiABBiiBDIIEAAYgAQYogRI8yJQoBFY5BtwAXgAkAEAmAGhAaAB-ASqAQMwLjW4AQPIAQD4AQGYAgagAtIFwgILEAAYgAQYsAMYogTCAggQABiwAxjvBcICBRAAGO8FmAMAiAYBkAYFkgcDMS41oAeNEbIHAzAuNbgHwwU&sclient=gws-wiz-serp

AFAIK everything in that answer is correct, except the first sentence,
which I knew to be wrong. After all, I had already had found and blogged
the poem. So I had to do it the hard way, and find it again in one of
his online books. Luckily I located it early, in his 1897 collection,
"The Earth Breath, and other poems" (on p. 69).
https://archive.org/details/earthbreathother00russuoft/page/n71/mode/2up

Not good.