Does Google's AI Overview have a creative mind?

Checking my work for a blog post, I googled was the US recession of 1982 severe

Yes, Gaio said, it was severe. 

 

Old responses from the AI Overview sometimes turn up in new Google search results, often in the "People also ask" section. Maybe Google archives the responses. I'm gonna test that theory by linking to Gaio's response to my question about the '82 recession.

It works. For now, at least.

 

Gaio said the 1982 recession "was the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression." You could probably find that said of most of the recessions since the Great Depression. But I got the confirmation I was looking for.

Gaio also gave some stats that I might want to consider when evaluating recession severity:

• The unemployment rate peaked at 10.8%...
• Gross Domestic Product (GDP) contracted by 2.7%...
• The prime interest rate reached a record high of 21.5%...

You'd think there would be a standard, accepted method (say, GDP contraction) for evaluating recession severity. But if there is, I never saw it.

Under "Other effects" Gaio lists more things I might want to use when evaluating the Volcker experiment:

• The recession led to homelessness.
• The recession contributed to the Latin American debt crisis.
• The recession contributed to long-lasting slowdowns in the Caribbean and Sub-Saharan African countries.
• The recession contributed to the US savings and loan crisis.
  

Yeah, I dunno.

The best part of Gaio's response was the statement about the causes of the recession:

The recession was caused in part by Paul Volcker's tight money policy to fight inflation. The recession was also affected by the Reagan administration's fiscal policy.

The recession was caused by Volcker's tight money, and affected by fiscal policy.

I don't suppose I can get away with assuming Gaio was relying on the subtle differences in meaning of "caused by" and "affected by". But I do like seeing tight money get most of the blame. Gaio's evaluation is correct, I think. And the AI view lends credence to Milton Friedman's view that

There is strong evidence that a monetary crisis involving a substantial decline in the quantity of money is a necessary and sufficient condition for a major depression. Fluctuations in monetary growth are also systematically related to minor ups and downs in the economy...

But I cannot say what I just said: that "the AI view lends credence to Milton Friedman's view". The AI view is not original, objective thinking. Far as I can tell, it is always a compilation of what it finds on the internet. It expresses things very well, far better than I can, sad to say. But if I lay out a problem -- the growth of financial cost -- and present it as a long-term cost-push problem, and point out that cost-push hinders economic growth (while demand-pull does not), will Gaio assemble the components on his own, make the argument that Excessive Reliance on Credit has increasingly made inflation a cost-push phenomenon, and conclude that our inability to achieve decent economic growth is a result of Financial cost-push?

Maybe. But I don't think he can assemble the components and arrive at a new theory.