Napoo finny! or How our phones really are making us stupid

I've been reading Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End and enjoying it. The second volume No More Parades in the tetralogy came out in 1925 so it's suitable for next week's group reading project. The four volumes are set from just before World War I through to shortly after it ends.

The protagonist Christopher Tietjens says, "Napoo finny," and then later Valentine Wannop also uses the phrase. What the heck? Napoo finny?

Turns out 'Napoo finny' is World War I British soldier slang; it's a comic mispronunciation of the French phrase "[Il] n'y [en] a plus; fini," roughly "No more of that; finished." Valentine says it of her chastity, though in point of fact she remains chaste. It's the same sort of instinct that led British soldiers to turn the Belgian battlefield town of Ypres into Wipers.

Where do you go when you want to know something like that? These days it's Internet search, of course; Google in my first attempt. I was on a train and had my phone with, so I searched with that. Google's AI response, which took up the whole of the phone screen was this:

 

 

I could tell this was nuts. 'Finny' is a child's term for excrement? In what world? Clearly the AI was still on the poo part. I scrolled down and got a better answer from a blog post. But the AI overview was so bad it was almost funny. Why not just giggle at a good poo joke? But they keep saying this is the AI that's about to take over the world.

 

But what was even stranger was that when I just now checked this out on my desktop computer, the Google AI overview was much more sensible:

 

 

Now the AI understood that 'finny' came from 'fini', and the strange bit about 'napoo' also meaning 'to kill' had disappeared. Had Google AI learned something in the couple of days between? They say AI is learning all the time.

 

Alas, no, because my phone still produced the same result above. The Google AI result on the phone is different--and wronger--than the one on my computer. What is Google trying to do to us? And only if we depend on our phones?

 

In general I feel like Internet search, whether Google, or what I more often use, DuckDuckGo (Bing) has just gotten worse in the past five years or so. The AI has not been a help. Does anybody else feel this?

 

Well, somebody else does. Eventually my library will deliver the new Cory Doctorow--Enshittification--and maybe then I'll know why...