Now that everyone is becoming too lazy to do old-fashioned Google searches and actual book research, park rangers in Northern California say they're starting to see the dangerous impacts of AI planning for hikers.A trio of college students from Roseville, outside Sacramento, have become the latest c autionary tale for hikers everywhere to not rely on AI chatbots to plan hiking routes or trips.The three young men, described as novice hikers, set out to summit Mount Shasta over the weekend. They did, in fact, make it to the top, but as Bay Area News Group explains, their reliance on Google's Gemini AI got them into some trouble when they then tried to get off the mountain, leading to them requiring rescue on Monday morning.According to a report from the Siskiyou County Sheriff’s Office, the trio set out on Saturday and made camp that night at around 8,400 feet on Mount Shasta. They then set out to make the summit at 3 am, assuming it would be an eight- or nine-hour hike. Despite hikers generally being told that they should turn around, no matter what, by noon, the three young men hiked on, not reaching the summit until 7 pm, and then they got lost as they tried descending after dark."An hour into their descent, the party called the Siskiyou County Sheriff’s Office Dispatch to ask for directions, but eventually wandered off-route into the Mud Creek Canyon," the sheriff's office says. One of the men then fell and injured his knee that night, and the group was "forced to bivouac in the steep drainage until they were met the following morning by the [US Forest Service] Climbing Rangers."The rangers then heard from the trio that they had relied on Google Gemini for guidance with their route, and with what to pack. "This was a critical misstep, as they were advised by Gemini to bring far less food and water than their group required, especially when their planned 8 hour ascent became a multi-day ordeal," the sheriff's office says.The situation was not as dire as it could have been, but the rangers and the sheriff’s office are using the incident to warn others, given that they're seeing an uptick in these kind of AI-caused missteps."This is the first year where we’ve started to have some AI fallout, if you will," says Nick Meyers, the lead climbing ranger with the US Forest Service and director of the Mount Shasta Avalanche Center, speaking to the Chronicle. "People are using it for trip-planning — 'Hey, can I do this up here? ' It’s not always correct."Meyers pointed to another incident this summer in which a young woman camped in an off-limits area of Shasta-Trinity National Forest, on the south side of Mount Shasta, that had clear "no camping" signage, and later told rangers that ChatGPT told her she could camp there. And Meyers tells the Chronicle he encountered a man hiking in the area who showed him a map print-out from ChatGPT that was "not even close to accurate," showing fictitious route lines and incorrect place names.The latter incident is especially confounding given how many accurate maps one would be able to find with a simple internet search. But perhaps it reflects how some people assume that ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini are more reliable than they really are.Related: Mark Zuckerberg Pens Arguably Out of Touch and Self-Serving Manifesto About the Future of AI ...read more read less