Until recently, when a question came up for debate or dispute in our house, the cry went up: ‘Google it!’. Now that seems to have been replaced by ‘Try chatgpt.’  I thought I would try it and, by way of a test, asked it for information about someone about whom I know a bit: the pre-war ski racer, aviatrix and media darling/It-girl, Audrey Sale-Barker.   

Sale-Barker in 1936. Skiing and bobbing at Grindelwald, but not at the Olympics

Chatgpt told me she got her pilot’s licence in 1927 which is wrong: her certificate from the Royal Aero Club is dated 13 August 1929. AI says she established some sort of record by flying to Paris in 1928, which seems unlikely. As for her stellar ski racing career, which is quite well documented, chagpt is surprisingly shy with the detail of her successes. She is said to have been an inaugural member of the Ladies’ Ski Club – she wasn’t – and to have captained the British team at the Winter Olympics in 1936. She didn’t: it was Jeannette Kessler. What about her personal/romantic life? Chatgpt suggests that she married a Sir Charles Barker. Where do they get that idea from? Her first and only marriage, in Edinburgh on 6 August 1949, was to Geordie Douglas Hamilton, the Earl of Selkirk.

Could do better.

I wonder if chatgpt and other AI portals will take my contribution to the ocean of knowledge on board.