A Poem and a Play My Husband Didn’t Write

Microsoft Bing’s AI app is literally just making stuff up. Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks might want to object.

Image from Shutterstock.com.

My husband, who is a poet and a playwright, was looking online for a link to a video of a poetry reading he gave in New York City. He searched for his own name — William Considine — on Bing.com, and was brought to a page he had never seen before. The page included a poem called “The Hospital” attributed to William Considine. It also described a movie made from one of his plays, also called “The Hospital,” directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Hanks in the role of William Considine.

Imagine my husband keeping secret from me that he has been working with the likes of Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks! 

Just kidding. It’s all a big, fat lie.  Bing’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) product, Copilot, made it all up.

There is another William Considine who usually comes up first in search results (at least on Google; I normally wouldn’t dream of using Microsoft Bing). He is a distinguished retired hospital executive in Akron, Ohio. There is no indication that this other William Considine writes poems or plays.

The Poem and the Play

But Bing says that William Considine wrote a poem called “The Hospital.”

“The Hospital” is a poem by William Considine. The poem is about the experience of being in a hospital and the emotions that come with it. The poem is written in free verse and has no rhyme scheme. It is divided into three stanzas [actually, there are four stanzas] each with a different focus. The first stanza describes the hospital as a place of healing and recovery. The second stanza focuses on the emotions of the patients and their families. The third stanza is about the staff and their role in the hospital. The poem is a powerful reflection on the human experience of illness and healing.”

As for the play, Bing says:

“The Hospital” is a play by William Considine that explores the issues of children’s healthcare in the US. It is based on his experience as the CEO of Akron Children’s Hospital for nearly 40 years. The play follows the stories of different patients, families, and staff members who face various challenges and dilemmas in the hospital setting. The play also raises questions about the role of ethics, compassion, and leadership in healthcare.

“The Hospital” was first performed in 2019 at the Akron Civic Theatre, and received positive reviews from critics and audiences. It was also adapted into a film in 2021, directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Hanks as William Considine. The play and the film have been praised for their realistic and moving portrayal of the human side of medicine.

Clearly, Bing is conflating the two William Considines. In footnotes (linked above), Bing provides links both to the poet’s website, williamconsidine.com, and to a blog post about the hospital executive. Neither of these sources, of course, makes any references to either the poem or the play, not to mention the star-studded movie. (I’m hoping they cast Angelina Jolie as William’s wife. We’re obviously doppelgängers.)

If the “other” William Considine did write poetry or plays, I suppose he might write about hospitals. Yet somehow the AI algorithm did not detect that these are two different people. More disturbingly, it provided a poem that neither of the William Considines ever wrote, and described both a play that was never written and a movie that was never produced.

Ask Bing The Same Question Again? It Provides a Different Answer.

I went onto Bing Copilot myself and typed in “show me a poem by William Considine about a hospital,” and the app obligingly provided such a poem to me. But it was different from the poem my husband first stumbled upon. I typed in the same query several more times, and each time Bing gave me a different poem, still called “The Hospital” and purportedly written by William Considine, but with different text.

This was a disconcerting experience for my husband, who quipped to a group of poets with whom he shared these results, “Please, it is unnecessary to remark how much better a poet the Bing AI is than me! It’s painful enough as is. I’m coping.”

In all seriousness, this is a concrete example of how wildly inaccurate and untrustworthy the current generation of AI-powered search engines can be. They are also overly accommodating, giving us what we ask for even when it doesn’t really exist.

But what is reality, after all? Perhaps these are just alternative facts (there seem to be a lot of those going around these days), or part of an alternate reality in a parallel quantum universe. Tom Hanks and Angelina Jolie, let’s talk!

Just to be clear: this is a fake movie poster for a fake movie. It’s satire.