Useless A.I.

The other day, I was trying to recall the date of the Hernandez-Chaves murders in Tucson. If you do not know the story, Vincente “Jose” Hernandez and his wife, Librada Chaves were murdered in their bedroom in Tucson by burglars on the night of August 6th - 7th, 1873. They were bludgeoned to death with a club made of mesquite wood, and had their throats cut. The perpetrators of the crime -  Jesus Saguaripa, Leocardo Cordova, and Clemente Lopez were captured within twenty-four hours. After being shown the evidence, the they confessed to the crime. The following day, after the funeral for Vincente and Librada, the three men, and a fourth named John Willis, who had been convicted of murder in courts, but was appealing the verdict, were summarily lynched in front to the courthouse by the citizenry. Anyway, I could not remember if the crime occurred in 1872 or 1873, so I Googled it using the search phrase "four men lynched in Tucson." This was the only time four men were lynched in Tucson, so I figured this would quickly give me the result I was looking for. Well, the first result, at the very top of the page, was from Google A.I., which informed me there was no extant record of four men ever being lynched in Tucson. It then proceeded to tell me to refer to the Bisbee Massacre, and the legal hanging of the perpetrators of that crime. I was taken aback. How could the Hernandez-Chaves murders and the subsequent lynching not be recorded, and how could Google A.I. not have a record of it? This was a significant event in the history of the Old Pueblo. The fact is, for historians and authors, A.I., as it exists today, is pretty useless. It can't do the research. It can't go to an archive and sort through pages of court documents or peruse microfilmed newspaper pages. A. I. draws exclusively from the information which is available on the web, and we all are well aware how accurate that is. If a falsehood has been perpetuated in numerous posts on numerous sites across the web, A. I. is going to present this as an answer whether it is true or not. A.I. cannot determine the veracity of a post, it can only regurgitate what is out there. It also is unable to analyze the data which is procured and draw conclusions. Some are concerned A.I. will one day replace authors and historians. I doubt this will happen. What concerns me more is that A.I. will replace serious historical research with pop-history content derived exclusively from spurious sources which is regularly passed off as fact on Reddit, YouTube, Facebook, and other social media sites. Just imagine deriving all your historical knowledge from Wikipedia.