Last month the hiking app AllTrails announced AI-generated (“leveraged”) custom routes as part of a new premium membership plan, and some people are worried about it. According to the National Observer, AllTrails and other hiking apps have gotten hikers into trouble because they rely on crowdsourced trail information, which isn’t necessarily official or safe. Given generative AI’s track record for producing spectacularly erroneous results, there would appear to be some cause for concern. Except that “AI” has become a marketing buzzword that covers a lot of computer stuff, from less problematic machine learning (which is what I’d expect in this case) along with more problematic generative AI/large-language models, and AllTrails isn’t indicating which flavour they’re referring to (because: buzzword). And as the National Observer points out, “These problems already existed before the AI was added.” To be sure, generative AI is a blight on human civilization, but let’s be clear about our targets in this case.