Three novice climbers needed rescue from California’s Mount Shasta last week after planning their trip with help from Google’s Gemini AI chatbot, according to a U.S. Forest Service report. One climber told rangers, “We relied too much on AI rather than our own critical thinking.”
The San Francisco Chronicle reports that the college students set out Saturday from the Clear Creek Trailhead on the mountain’s southeastern flank, planning to camp partway up and push for the summit early last Sunday. The Siskiyou County Sheriff’s Office and the Forest Service ended up responding after the group hit trouble on the descent and had to spend a night outside.
The Clear Creek route runs 8 miles and climbs 6,500 feet. Once the mountain has melted out, it doesn’t require ice axes or crampons, which makes it one of the easier ways up Shasta. The climbers had researched the trip using YouTube videos and Google’s Gemini AI, asking the chatbot for guidance on their route and how much food and water to bring. For navigation, they planned to rely on the AllTrails phone app.
They reached the summit Sunday evening, well past the midafternoon turnaround time rangers recommend. Heading down, they mistook a digital suggested route line in AllTrails for an actual trail. “Those are suggested routes, not trails,” said Nick Meyers, the Forest Service’s lead climbing ranger and director of the Mount Shasta Avalanche Center.
From there things got worse. The phone they were using to navigate died, and a spare power bank failed to connect properly. By Sunday night the group was, in the Forest Service’s words, “well off-route,” and had to camp in the open. They called for rescue that night; rangers reached them Monday morning.
The climbers rangers found were exhausted, hungry and thirsty, low on food and water, and without proper clothing or gear. They’d also pitched camp in a prohibited area near a freshwater spring and left trash and food scraps behind. Rangers walked the group back to base camp.
Afterward, the climbers told rangers that Google Gemini had recommended simple carbohydrates over fats for the climb “because they ‘take too long to digest,’” according to the Forest Service report. This is exactly opposite of the approach climbers take to food supplies. Additionally, the climbers were advised that they would not need additional layers of clothes which left them critically exposed at night.
Looking back on the trip, the climbers told officials, “We relied too much on AI rather than our own critical thinking.” The Sheriff’s Office called their reliance on the technology “a critical misstep.” Meyers was more direct: “They were totally blowing it in all regards.”
This isn’t the first time AI-generated trip advice has caused problems on Shasta this year. Earlier in the summer, a woman was found camping in a clearly marked “no camping” zone on the mountain’s south side. Her explanation, according to Meyers: “AI told me I can camp here.” In August, a man at the Bunny Flat area asked rangers for directions using a printed map he’d generated with ChatGPT. The route lines and place names on it were wrong. “It was terrible, terrible, not even close to accurate,” Meyers said. “It had route lines and place names that were totally off, just ridiculous. We were like, dude, you gotta throw that away.”
Meyers said he’s noticed a pattern this season. “This is the first year where we’ve started to have some AI fallout,” he said. “People are using it for trip planning, ‘Hey, can I do this up here?’ It’s not always correct.”
When humans allow AI to do all of their thinking for them, a problem known as “cognitive offloading,” bad things happen — whether it is novice climbers stranded on a mountain or teens sucked into a mental health crisis. Breitbart News social media director Wynton Hall has written his instant bestseller Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI to serve as the definitive guide on how the MAGA movement can create positions on AI that benefit humanity without handing control of our nation to the leftists of Silicon Valley or allowing the Chinese to take over the world.
Read more at the San Francisco Chronicle here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.