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Heh, I'm guessing this comes from one of the Reddit threads below where it mentions "Size 14 feet"
It's on the internet, so it must be true!
I wonder if Googles AI response will be even more confident because of your response. As for whatever reason your Comment appears in the snippet on Google Search

https://ibb.co/y84rTDP

Or do a search on Donald Trump and read only results on Kamala Harris...
Please take a look at HN guidelines for commenting:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Almost all of your recent comments seem outside of these guidelines:

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=silexia

Thank you.

You may disagree with my ideas, but this is a genuine contribution relevant to the article being discussed.
Here's my first page of results:

https://ibb.co/tMdRcMQ

https://ibb.co/WByccyF

https://ibb.co/BN2nSZH

It's all Donald Trump links except for the news section which is a mix of articles that are either specific to Trump or mention Trump.

So what you describe is inaccurate for me and another HN reader who replied to you, and is probably the most inflammatory contribution one could make to this thread. There's nowhere to go with your comment that's likely to lead to fruitful conversation.

I don't see anything about his height at the link.
Sorry, I knew it is a risk that everyone gets different results on Google. For me the "featured snippet" is taken from this page, which was obviously generated by an LLM, and which plainly states that Phelps is 14 feet tall.

To me, it is a signifier that the web is truly dead, and LLMs killed it. The search engines are featuring the LLM outputs now.

https://www.scienceabc.com/sports/michael-phelps-height-arms...

Not just LLMs. Search engines like Google based on spying for money.
Too low quality, I think it's just a crappy content farm and not an LLM (e.g. using "he did' instead of "he was" in the intro and the lactate threshold diagram is wrong)
Archived, so future generations can know how good things used to be: https://web.archive.org/web/20240802203907/https://www.googl...
To be clear, this is not Google getting it wrong. This is the AI-generated slop website getting it wrong, Google is just pulling an extract.
The end result is Google is getting it wrong, we just have two layers of machine slop at work
In the intervening 15 minutes the Google featured snippet has changed, it is now the first paragraph of that page, instead of the paragraph that says he is 14 feet tall.
Their job is to surface useful search results at the top, and inaccurate or untrustworthy sources at the bottom. They used to be quite good at doing that.
The extract being used for a search would fall in Google's domain, one would think.
Google's offense is not detecting and excluding it. Their spam filter is not working well.
Of all the sources (and their reliability) available to Google, they chose the one thinking that fourteen feet is a reasonable length for a human.
Maybe AI is just interpreting results from a different timeline where Phelps is actually 14 ft tall! /s
The A.I. appears to have misinterpreted "FEET Size 14" seen at the bottom of the picture.
I've been getting erroneous unit conversions for half a year now -

https://www.google.com/search?q=130m+to+inches

Interestingly, "130m to in" works

https://www.google.com/search?q=130m+to+in

"130m in inches" works. I'm pretty sure that's the "native" syntax and anything else is fed through some kind of heuristic recogniser which obviously didn't work in this case. Very strange failure mode though!
Note that the query is "does michael phelps have gigantic hands" and returns th text "Phelps has huge palms that support his paddling ability and is 14 feet tall, which essentially act as flippers (the kind of fingerless arms that seals have)." in the top response next to a picture showing him 6' 4".

If you search "how tall is michael phelps" you get the answer: 6′ 4″

This is another contrived "gotcha".

Punctuation is important:

https://jasomill.at/777.png

This is misleading, but not technically inaccurate.

But Bing also claims I can store 410 trillion microSD cards in a 40-foot intermodal shipping container:

https://jasomill.at/nanoSD.pdf

flugzeuginfo will be a German source, a locale where dot and comma in numbers are switched.
Correct, but to avoid confusion, search engines should present infobox results using the locale conventions of the search page (en-US in my example), not the source.

For instance, Google correctly reports Germany's 2022 GDP as $4.082 trillion in en-US and $4,082 Billionen in de-DE.

They have since fixed the caption:

Michael Phelps's height, wingspan, and large hands and feet give him an advantage in swimming. His body also produces less lactic acid than his rivals, which shortens his recovery time. Jan 18, 2024

And they point to this article: https://www.scienceabc.com/sports/michael-phelps-height-arms...

"wingspan"

Can't wait for the results talking about Phelp's flying abilities.