I’m sorry. This is a rant. Which you’ve probably guessed by the title, duh!

The straw that broke my back was the lead I saw:

“Sweden built smart machines where crows trade trash for food, turning clever birds into unexpected city cleaners.”

A clearly AI-generated image didn’t help the credibility (a three-legged crow is quite telling), yet it’s the headline that made me do the search. “Search” is such a big word, though. It was literally one query.

Not Sweden, but one Swedish startup. Not built, but run a one-time pilot. And it didn’t get anywhere close to turning crows into city cleaners as the project was abandoned with zero follow-up.…