Stardew Valley farmer takes advice from AI, ends up brewing 136 useless bottles of rice juice

In today’s episode of “innocent AI usage goes wrong,” a Stardew Valley player wastes a bunch of time and resources because a Google AI summary lied to their face.

“Don’t listen to Google and mill your rice for vinegar,” warned user WonderfulScholar6171 on the Stardew subreddit this week. “If you want to avoid a mass amount of rice juice that is.”

Scholar shared a screenshot of their Google query “how to make vinegar stardew” and its generated answer: “In Stardew Valley update 1.6+, you can make vinegar by placing 1 unit or Rice (or Unmilled Rice) into a Keg.”

The error lies in the parenthetical. You do, in fact, have to mill your rice before throwing it into a keg if you want vinegar. Skip that step (or be misdirected by a machine that only pretends to produce reason) and, well, “now I’m left with 136 Unmilled Rice Juice.”

Don’t listen to Google and mill your rice for vinegar from r/StardewValley

The second screenshot is simply tragic: rows upon rows of neatly arranged kegs destined for vinegar production, but instead packing hundreds of gallons of rice juice. What the heck is rice juice? You can drink it for a little stamina and health, or sell it for around 90 gold. Not exactly a money-printing operation.

As many in the comments were quick to point out, Google summaries are best ignored when truth is relevant. A search engine listing that is routinely wrong is by default the worst result, much like how a fridge that only chills your food for part of each day is the worst refrigerator.

To be fair to our accidental juice mogul, they’re hardly the first to shove unmilled rice into a keg expecting vinegar. Someone else came to the Starfew subreddit three years ago to share the same PSA.

Ironically, that post is one of several PSAs that appear when you duplicate this original search and scroll past Google’s made-up, incorrect guess. Scroll past Reddit results and you eventually reach the human-made wiki entry for vinegar that the AI poorly stole from:

“Vinegar can also be made by putting Rice into a Keg,” it reads.

Good to know.