r/Mountaineering • u/suchabadamygdala • 4d ago
Climbers rescued from Mount Shasta after relying on AI chatbot to plan trip
https://www.sfchronicle.com/outdoors/article/shasta-climbers-rescued-chatgpt-22414629.php“They were totally blowing it in every regard” ranger stated.
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u/299792458mps- 4d ago
"Climbers" is awfully generous
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u/SocomPS2 4d ago
Author probably used AI to write the article.
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u/harmless_gecko 4d ago
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u/suchabadamygdala 4d ago edited 4d ago
Sorry, I missed this. Edit: the Chronicle article says they left trash and food at their campsite. This detail wasn’t in the SF Gate article which was very detailed otherwise. Think it’s worth seeing that very revealing fact, as well as ranger’s statement about “Totally blowing it in every regard”
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u/UWalex 4d ago
I am an AI hater but it took them 10 hours to ascend 2500 feet, I’m not sure AI is the real problem here.
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u/trusty_rombone 4d ago
I know it drives clicks here, but blaming this on AI rather than stupid, inexperienced kids getting in over their heads is a braindead take. And I'm not even an AI fan.
The inexperience comes into play when they were still less than halfway up the climb at 1PM, 10 hours into the climb. Anyone with a modicum of experience would've known at the point that they were too slow and should've turned around (and the party which let them know they could still summit gave them horrible advice). You can't blame that lack of judgment on AI. Or the lack of judgment to even consider Shasta without sufficient experience.
5 years ago, these kids would've used Google to research the climb, and probably ended up in the same scenario, but I don't think we would've blamed Google for them being stupid. Inexperienced people have been dying in the mountains long before any of these tools existed.
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u/alpacadom 3d ago
Exactly. The same problem clearly would have happened if they bought and read a guidebook.
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u/Sofasurvivor 1d ago
To be fair, with the old-fashioned kind of research, you often got info that you had not been looking for. They might have stumbled across advice about turning back, etc. if they had used internet research or read a book.
AI gives you only what you ask for, and maybe, if you're lucky, some added stuff other people who asked similar questions wanted to know.
However, after they realized they were too slow,and were told to turn around, yeah, the stupid was all their own.
(Except for that other party. I don't understand that part. Did they not tell that party how long it had taken them to that point?)
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u/Well_Hacktually 1d ago
If they had used search engines to do their research, they at least would have been doing actual research, and would have gotten more and better information then whatever "information" spicy autocorrect gave them.
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u/Annual-Echidna3577 4d ago
The AI angle seems like clickbait. This is an old story - they were inexperienced, overconfident, and failed to recognize the risks. Not reaching the summit until 7pm, with ~6000' of descent back to camp - not good! Hopefully they were ok in the end and learned from the experience.
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u/clyab 4d ago
This is the consequence of outdoor communities pushing to make objectively risky hobbies “accessible”.
One used to have to seek out a mentor or some form of face-to-face instruction, especially with mountaineering but also backcountry skiing, climbing, backpacking, ect.
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u/Cameltoenail 4d ago
I could not agree more. It took me a decade of mentors, classes and self exploration to get comfortable in the mountains, and it’s still a cautious and calculated comfortable. My friend just hit me up that he’s ready to do Shasta after hiking Mt. Diablo and if I had any tips for him.
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u/299792458mps- 3d ago
Well, as much as social media has contributed to more and more inexperienced people getting into risky hobbies, it's also contributed to more and more stories about such incidents.
It's not like in the past mountaineering was some sacred activity that you had to go through jedi training to achieve. Dumb people would get in over their heads out in the wilderness all the time, it just wouldn't make it past the local news so you'd never hear about it. Now you're only aware of it because you're part of an online community that funnels stories about mountaineering from all over the world to your fingertips.
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u/clyab 3d ago
You’re honestly saying things out of your ass. There isn’t any data pointing to what you’re suggesting.
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u/299792458mps- 3d ago
You don't need data, it's common fucking sense. I didn't say any hard statistics, I just said people have always gotten lost in the mountains and that's not an exclusive consequence of some modern phenomenon that you just happened to make up.
Literally everything you said is as much talking out of your ass as what I said, so shut up. Here I am just trying to contribute to a casual conversation and I get accosted by you. Jesus Christ it's too early for this bullshit.
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u/Sofasurvivor 1d ago
Look up the Dachstein tragedy. That was before AI. Overconfident men disregarding all advice is older than the internet.
Does it happen more often? Probably, people travel more, in general. But stupidity was a thing before the internet.
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u/curiosity8472 3d ago
Statistically speaking, mountaineering deaths on a per-person or per-trip basis is lower than ever.
People have always been idiots, but weather forecasts and satellite communications have saved many lives.
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u/OlderThanMyParents 4d ago
As I've said a hundred times, AI is an enthusiastic but unreliable assistant. It can be invaluable, but you have to be able and willing to double-check it every step of the way. If you're not capable of doing that, especially in a life-or-death situation, you're literally playing Russian roulette.
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u/EnlightenedBuddah 4d ago
I mean if you shove a mic in Park Rangers face and goad them, of course they are going to shit on AI.
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u/Infinite_Study5186 4d ago
Sounds like they were just dumb assholes