Miguel Afonso Caetano"Two hikers trying to tackle Unnecessary Mountain near Vancouver, British Columbia, had to call in a rescue team after they stumbled into snow. The pair were only wearing flat-soled sneakers, unaware that the higher altitudes of a mountain range only some 15 degrees of latitude south of the Arctic Circle might still be snowy in the spring.
"We ended up going up there with boots for them," Brent Calkin, leader of the Lions Bay Search and Rescue team, told the Vancouver Sun. "We asked them their boot size and brought up boots and ski poles."
It turns out that to plan their ill-fated expedition, the hikers heedlessly followed the advice given to them by Google Maps and the AI chatbot ChatGPT.
Now, Calkin and his rescue team are warning that maybe you shouldn't rely on dodgy apps and AI chatbots — a piece of technology known for lying and being wrong all the time — to plan a grueling excursion through the wilderness.
"With the amount of information available online, it's really easy for people to get in way over their heads, very quickly," Calkin told the Vancouver Sun.
Across the pond, a recent report from Mountain Rescue England and Wales blamed social media and bad navigation apps for a historic surge in rescue teams being called out, the newspaper noted."
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