When developing plugins for the Delphi IDE, which should support several IDE versions, one sometimes needs to know when a particular change to the VCL or the IDE itself was made. E.g. if you want to change the background color of a Panel, you need to disable theming for that panel. The easiest way to do that is setting its StyleElements property to []. But when exactly was StyleElements introduced? I used Google and searched for “delphi when was styleelements introduced”. Now, Google integrated its helpful AI Gemini into the search function and it tried to be helpful indeed:
Since it gives such a level of detail you could assume that it must be correct, right? Wrong: Not only was StyleElements introduced in Delphi XE3 (that’s 3 versions after Delphi 2010) but also did FMX not bring the use of it to the VCL components.
The AI sounds totally convincing anyway.
Luckily I don’t have to rely on it but can find out by trial and error. But this is a case where it is simple to verify / falsify the statement. Other, more complex cases are much worse because people (me included) tend to believe what is stated like this. So this is yet another reminder that “AI” is not intelligent but only a complex machine for creating strings of words based on a large dataset of “learned” text. It does not understand the question nor has it thought about the answer.