AI desires tramcars

I was going to post a few more photos of TTC streetcars going about their business. As I was building up the post in my head I wondered if 'desire' was actually the term for a group of streetcars - you know, like 'a murder of crows' means a group of crows - or if it was just something Robert Jowitt cooked up for his 1969 book, A Desire of Tramcars, a copy of which I finally bought a few months ago.

Like any other resident of the 21st century who wants to know something I asked Google if desire was the term for a group of  streetcars, and also typed in the book's title as the source of my question. Much to my surprise it came back with one of those AI summaries of Jowitt's book.

A few days ago in a long, late night discussion about the ins-and-outs of today's AI at a Toronto bar I tried to argue that AI seems to me to fabricate a lot, but presents it with great authority as if it were irrefutably true. I guess I had too much to drink to make a forceful case because I didn't make much headway with my argument, but I present the above unsolicited AI Overview as a sober example.

I present it because it's dead wrong.

The table of contents on the left gives you a list of the themes

Ok, well, yes some of the points it mentions are touched on, but what book on streetcars (or trams or trollies or whatever you want to call them) doesn't. What this particular book is, is a collection of the author's photographs of trams in operation in the UK and Europe, shot from 1958 to 1968, and arranged thematically instead of technologically or chronologically, which are more-or-less the standard organizations for these sorts of books. It's a book about the love of streetcars, not of their instrumentality.

I rather like Jowitt's book and often find myself leafing through it. If it does make arguments as suggested by the AI Overview, it does it romantically rather than analytically through it's use of photographs and themes instead of statistics and engineering. 

Although, Jowitt isn't adverse to explicitly making a point with words:

"Fools, fools are these little men who think they can live by motor-car alone. Fools are the Socialists who want to scrap what they think are stodgy old-school Conservative trams, at the same time protesting in towns where the Conservatives are mistakenly engaged on 'taking away the people's trams'. It is not the tram which is an anachronism, it is the men who scrap it thinking they are being progressive and modernistic. It is not the tram which causes congestion, it is the army of replacing cars and buses fighting in disorder through a fog of exhaust."

I suspect the AI can only deal with the words in the book in a particular manner and can't understand how the words, photographs (which are the main feature), and organization together make the author's case, if the 'case' is what you're reading this book for. It's a case that a human is making to other humans, and is unfathomable to the AI's software. The AI Overview makes the book sound like some sort of dry, required reading for MBA course work (although the student would likely just 'read' the AI Overview and consider it done), and not the pleasant and enjoyable book that works on several levels.