FEATURE: Don't Trust AI to Tell You if a Watch is Genuine or Even If It Exists at All!

Quite regularly now I receive emails from people asking me to advise whether the watch they are thinking of purchasing is genuine or not. Of course I don't mind helping if I can, but honestly most of the time your best option is to join the THF forum and post the pictures there as there are much more fake-savvy people there who can advise you far better than I can. If a watch is obviously fake or it's an older model and I can be pretty sure it's pukka then I will give my opinion, but for anything recent, especially Formula 1 or Aquaracers, I generally can't say with any certainty.

However, when you get a watch like this 'TAG Heuer USA Air Force F-16 A/R Limited Edition' I don't really need to think too hard because this is clearly not a genuine TAG Heuer because this model simply doesn't exist!

But what if you don't know much about watches? Maybe you just think it looks cool? Some parts of it do look pretty cool I guess, if you like Breitlings... 

What do people do these days when they want to learn about something? They ask Chat GPT or Google AI right? And you'd hope that AI would tell them this watch doesn't exist... wouldn't you?

Sadly no. Because AI is trained by reading every last piece of crap anyone ever put on the internet (no matter whether it's true or not), Google AI actually tells you that: 'While not an official US Air Force timepiece, the 'TAG Heuer USA Air Force F-16 A/R Limited Edition' is a rare unofficial collaborative timepiece. This is not formal military issue, but a 'special creation' or 'commemorative piece'. AI also claims that 'Due to it's rarity and unofficial nature this model is a unique collector's item and not a standard production watch'.

Now reading that from the perspective of knowing that this is just garbage is one thing, but imagine you don't know anything about watches, that makes it sound like a genuinely enticing collectors item doesn't it? Yes it uses the word 'unofficial' which could cast doubt, but it also uses the word 'collaborative' which makes it sound like it was a genuine product that was never sold but only distributed to the US Air Force. Which I can assure you is utter bollocks. 

So, once again we see that AI doesn't actually know it's arse from it's elbow... 

Well actually, it's worse than that, because it does know what it's talking about 90% of the time... or at least often enough that people trust it to give them the right answer, which is genuinely worse than useless really. And while in the scheme of things someone wasting a few hundred pounds on this junk might not be the end of the world, I can just imagine that in the future we're going to get endless books and documentaries about people who made GENUINELY terrible errors of judgment because they trusted AI.

Further probing of the AI appeared to reveal some doubts, but then it doubled down claiming that 

the watch is part of a series created to honour the Lockeed Martin F-16 Fighting Falcon. Is it bollocks!

And given that the world is obsessed with having everything 'controlled' by AI I imagine it's only a matter of time until we are faced with some terrible calamity brought about by our short sighted trust in what is clearly a flawed concept. Maybe it could work if it was only fed 'trusted' information, but that would take years... no far better to let it read every Reddit thread and form its world view from that. 🤣