More AI Smackdown - ChatGPT, Copilot, & Gemini Write Poetry

Introduction

Two posts ago, I described what I think is a fundamental dichotomy between two central capabilities of modern AI chatbots: 1) helping with a nuts-and-bolts operation like coding software or scripting HTML, and 2) creating something original, like an essay or story. The first category involves being a resourceful researcher blessed with excellent natural language processing; the second is probably closer to what humans are (so far) uniquely capable of doing.

Earlier this year I did a whole post on the first category, “What is ChatGPT Great At (and Not)?” And last week I blogged about one aspect of the second category: writing a scholastic essay. To further explore AI’s ability to generate meaningful content, and to evaluate its ability to truly understand language, I turn this week to poetry. That is, I decided to have the three dominant chatbots—Gemini, ChatGPT, and Copilot—write a poem in an unusual meter: dactylic trimeter, a poetic form I learned in high school (details here). I chose this meter because, as described here, ChatGPT does a pretty good job at the classic Shakespearean sonnet in iambic pentameter, but I wonder if that’s just really good parroting since there’s such a vast amount of training data out there for that. I think this exercise really puts the chatbots through their paces, giving us insight into which is the closest to being truly intelligent. As you shall see, the differences in performance are not subtle.

(Custom art by Whisk. No rights reserved.)

Gemini’s effort

To start out, I quizzed Gemini about dactylic trimeter, to see if it knows what I’m even talking about. Gemini correctly stated that the rhythm of such a poem would be “DA-da da | DA-da-da | DA-da-da,” and an example it created of the form was reasonably close. So far so good. But then, to make the rhythm better, I instructed  the chatbot to add an extra trochee at the end of each line. A trochee is a two-syllable word with the stress on the first syllable, as in the word “praises” and the word “spirit.” As an example of this modification to dactylic trimeter, I provided Gemini these lines (that I took from a poem you can read here, in this albertnet post):

Once in a while a voice will sing praises,
Something to levitate everyone’s spirits.

A really smart AI, I would argue, could reverse-engineer the meter from those two lines alone, but I went one better and described exactly what I wanted in technical terms. Gemini correctly stated that the rhythm would therefore be “DA-da-da | DA-da-da | DA-da-da | DA-da” but its initial attempts at it were totally screwed up. I gave it a lot of coaching. I guess this is okay; a human with actual intelligence might require this as well.

Moving on, I prompted Gemini, “Now I would like to see if you can write such a poem based on an essay I provide. You can work in as much as you think works, understanding that not everything will fit. If I paste in a 1,600-word essay could you do that?” It said (in its usual obsequious way), “That sounds like a very interesting challenge! Yes, I can absolutely take a 1,600-word essay and distill its key themes, concepts, and emotional tones to create a poem in the specific Dactylic Trimeter + Trochee (11 syllables) structure.” I added that the poem should be ten lines long, with an ABBA rhyme scheme for the first two quatrains and then a rhyming couplet at the end. And I told it, “Focus on the idea of caprice: choosing the more difficult route simply to exercise one’s radical freedom and prove one’s mettle to oneself.”

Now, if you are a devoted follower of albertnet, you may recall that some years ago I wrote a poem in dactylic trimeter about my favorite cycling hill climb, the one-two punch of the steep, twisty roads El Toyonal and Lomas Cantadas. And, as with most of the  poems on this blog, I provided copious footnotes and commentary, just as you’d get in an anthology of Shakespeare’s sonnets. To help AI write a good poem, the “essay” I uploaded was the compilation of my footnotes, so that Gemini had plenty of material to work with: the fleshed-out observations, feelings, etc. behind my Lomas poem. The idea here is to give you, reader, the ability to do a side-by-side comparison of two poems on the same topic—one written by your amateur blogger, the other by a much-ballyhooed AI. You can decide for yourself who did the better job. Here is my poem (and you can click here for the footnotes):

Ode to Lomas Cantadas

El Toyonal is a beast of an uphill;
Pedaling here is a bit self-defeating.
Lomas Cantadas will sweeten your beating:
Insult to injury, sweet overkill!

Most riders wisely take Wildcat Canyon.
Half the uphill, after all—and you’re tired!
Wisdom, alas, is a flaw when you’re mired
In glory, in notions of being a man.

Sometimes caprice is much better than ease:
Radical freedom is here to be seized!

Here is Gemini’s poem, representing its effort to incorporate all my footnotes and commentary:

Reckless Choice

The simple road beckons And calmly the wind calls,
We stand at the turn now, Deciding to stay free.
To choose the hard pulses Our own perversity.
We turn for the suffering feeling the high walls.

The logic demands the Less burdensome track-way,
But we must display the Radical self-might.
We take the bad option Defying the pure light.
To prove we are strong to Our own confidences.

Yet this is the price of The joy and the pain-fall,
A reckless decision That answers the soul’s call.

So … how would you rate Gemini’s poem? Is AI going to come after our poets and put them out of work? Frankly, I’m less than impressed. The meter is a crude approximation of what I asked for, but as you surely felt (whether or not you could articulate the precise problem), almost every line is too long by one syllable, and instead of the easy, rollicking rhythm of a proper Krooprian poem, Gemini’s ode staggers and stutters. The AI pretty much blew it.

In case you really want to geek out, here’s exactly where the AI went wrong: in nine out of the ten lines, for no apparent reason, it preceded the first dactyl with an unstressed syllable, violating the rule I set forth about dactylic trimeter. Meanwhile, words like “perversity,” “radical,” and “confidences” aren’t padded out properly so we either have to mispronounce them to preserve the meter, or sound them out naturally which disturbs the rhythm—and since we don’t know which to do, we’re stopped in our tracks.

As far as the content, you can sense the AI compromising sense in order to (try to) achieve the rhythm and rhyme. Why else would it use the word “pulses,” the phrase “high walls,” and the Franken-words “track-way,” “self-might,” and “pain-fall”? The chatbot is practically babbling.

So is that it? I give it, say, a D and we move on to the next AI? Not so fast. I made the rookie move of feeding my prompt to the default version, 2.5 Flash, instead of the flagship version, 2.5 Pro, which Gemini tells me is “more adept at tasks requiring complex reasoning, deep instruction following, and high-quality creative output.” The good news is, as the AI assured me, all the context of my chat with 2.5 Flash can be used by 2.5 Pro, so it was super easy to switch to Pro and have the chatbot try again. Here’s its second effort, using the 2.5 Pro version:

The Gauntlet Thrown

Sober thoughts point the logical straight-way,
Turning left proves a man is still willing,
Recklessly choosing what he must still be,
Turning from all that the reasonable say.

This is the freedom to throw all the rules about,
Knowing the payment and what it will cost him,
Twenty hard minutes of everything lost now,
Heeding the irrational gonzo-man’s shouting.

A purely perverse act of personal pride,
Proving the mettle he carries inside him.

Well, I suppose it’s a bit better. Only one line erroneously starts with an accented syllable, and three of the lines actually have the correct meter (a modest improvement over 2.5 Flash’s zero). There’s some nice alliteration in the penultimate line. I also appreciate that 2.5 Pro didn’t do weird stuff with capitalization in the middle of each line. But the rhyming is pretty janky, and we still have these weird bolted-together phrases “straight-way” and the truly bizarre “gonzo-man.” To top it off, the very last word of the poem violates the rhyming convention, so the poem goes out on a flat note. This second poem is better but not by much.

Conclusion: if Gemini offers to write my next albertnet ode for me, I’ma be like, “Naw, I’m good.”

On to our next contestant.

ChatGPT’s effort

I asked ChatGPT if it could write a poem in dactylic trimeter. It said, kind of curtly, “Definitely — I can write in dactylic trimeter.” Unlike Gemini, it didn’t bother to give me a sample straightaway. Maybe this is to save on computing cycles (and thus energy and water), which I can appreciate. But ironically, this is the one chatbot whose capability I have reason to doubt, because as you may recall, I tried this prompt before, almost verbatim, with version GPT-3.5, back in February of 2023. That chatbot crashed and burned with this poetic abomination:

Pedaling up Toyonal, heart pumping fast
My mind is clear, free from the world’s contrast
With caprice and freedom, I take each turn
Pushing through pain, for what I will earn
Onward I climb, up Lomas Cantadas
My legs scream out, but my spirit never fades
The wind in my hair, the world fades away
A moment of peace, that I long to stay
And at last I reach the summit high
A sense of triumph, that no words can deny

Ugh. I almost threw up in my mouth rereading that. As you can see, GPT-3.5 ignored my instructions about meter, made a very half-assed effort to weave the theme of caprice into its poem, and worst of all produced pure treacle, like the verbal equivalent of Thomas Kinkade. Needless to say I was eager, this evening, to see how the more modern version would do.

I gave GPT-5.1 the same prompts as Gemini, uploading the same 1,600-word essay, and here is what it produced:

Lomas Caprice

Turning toward Toyonal, reckless and laughing
Choosing the steep when the wise path is brighter
Mocking my reasons, the prudent, the lighter
Savoring folly my sane side is quashing

Freedom is choosing the climb that will break me
Just for the thrill of defying the sensible
Proving I’m bent for the wholly nonsensical
Riding the harder way just ’cause it shakes me

Pain is a dare that I answer with pleasure
Freely embracing the hurt as a measure

Well, ChatGPT has come a long way for sure, but GPT-5.1’s effort is only somewhat better than Gemini’s. Certainly the meter is better, with a majority of the lines being correct. But the content is really off, with a bunch of the words clearly chosen just to satisfy the technical requirements without adding much meaning. The bit about “wise path is brighter” really makes no sense and is clearly just there for the rhythm and rhyme, no more sophisticated than Hall & Oates’ “your kiss is on my list.” In the next line, who is doing the mocking? And how does “the lighter” fit into anything? Lighter sky? Lighter weight? Cigarette lighter? It’s just a random word dropped into the poem. And in the next line, the word “quashing” in no way rhymes with “laughing” and doesn’t make sense as an intransitive verb. (“What are you doing this weekend?” / “Oh, you know, I’ll just be at home, quashing.”)

 I confess, I rather like the line “Freedom is choosing the climb that will break me,” but then the poem loses momentum again and commits rhythm-sucking metrical errors on the next two lines (though I like “bent”). The eighth line, suggesting that a hard climb “shakes me,” is lame, another word selected only because it rhymes. And that last line? “Freely embracing the hurt as a measure”? Huh? What is it measuring? This poem is lame.

Since AI does its best work when you iterate with increasingly refined and specific prompts, calling out what it did wrong in its previous attempt, I decided to give ChatGPT another chance, and told it, “I think it would be better if it didn’t assume what you and I know already about this climb. Consider that somebody encountering this poem for the first time wouldn't know that Wildcat Canyon is the easier climb, and that choosing the 1-2 punch of El Toyonal and Lomas Cantadas makes no logical sense but appeals to one’s love of suffering and sense of caprice. So, please try again on the poem and give the reader enough background to grasp all this and thus to understand the choice.” It came back with a poem that was quite broken, with the same issue that Gemini’s first effort had: starting each line with an unstressed syllable. It also screwed up the rhyme in the second quatrain. I coached it repeatedly to fix these issues, and after several tries this ended up being its best effort:

Reckless Climb

Climbing the hills of green Berkeley foothills,
Pedaling hard as the thighs start to quiver,
Wheels weaving wild like a paperboy’s river,
Lungs heaving fire as the body fulfills.

Turning to torment, no reason persuades me,
Pain blooms in muscles yet joy is commanding,
Twists of the road, and the thrill never fades me,
Searing the legs, but the spirit is standing.

Pleasure is folly, the wholly absurd,
We choose what will hurt us, yet laugh at the hurt.

Right off the bat, the first line has three problems: it trips us up with a missing syllable; the hills are not always green; and hills/foothills is somehow both redundant and oxymoronic. The rest of the lines have correct meter, but a bunch of really clunky constructions. Wheels weaving wild? Really? And what could “like a paperboy’s river” possibly mean? “Lungs heaving fire”—what am I, a dragon? And the body fulfills what? (I just asked ChatGPT if “fulfill” can be an intransitive verb, and it replied, “No — “fulfill” is fundamentally a transitive verb, which means it requires a direct object.”) The mention of the twists of the road isn’t connected to anything, and “thrill never fades me” makes no sense—I mean, is the thrill like the sun, and I’m a curtain? There’s just an abundance of nonsense here, though I do like the last line. My last complaint is that the AI didn’t consistently follow the rhyme scheme I asked for: its second quatrain is ABAB, not ABBA. I asked it five times to fix this and it never did.

In summary, I’d say this poem is marginally better than Gemini’s effort (I mean, it doesn’t have anything as glaring as “irrational gonzo-man’s shouting”) but it’s basically unusable. Maybe GPT-6 will do better.

Copilot’s effort

Copilot knew exactly what dactylic trimeter was, and its initial example was remarkably good. I suppose it could have plagiarized something, or has a bit of boilerplate at the ready, but in any case I was impressed.  I gave it the same extra instruction about tacking on an extra dactyl, and it got it almost right on the first try; a bit more coaching and it nailed it. After invoking Smart (GPT-5) mode, I fed Copilot the full prompt, with the same footnotes from my Lomas Contadas poem. Here is what the chatbot came up with:

Caprice on the Hills

Turning away from the sensible roadway,
Madness compels me to suffer the steepness.
Reason protests, but I laugh at its weakness,
Choosing the torment that beckons me boldly.

Freedom is found in the reckless decision,
Mocking the logic that urges avoidance.
Pain is a proof of my will and its poignance,
Glory is born of capricious derision.

Taunted by Toyonal, daring and cruel,
Lomas Cantadas declares I’m no fool.

Wow. Just wow. It is so much better than what Gemini and ChatGPT came up with. The meter is actually perfect. (Full disclosure: the meter falls short of what’s in my poem, but only because I forgot to give the AI one more instruction—to shorten the final line of each quatrain, and both lines in the couplet, by one syllable, to give them more punch. To be honest I’d forgotten I did this with my ode.)

I think the AI did a pretty job with the content as well. Calling my will “poignant” is a bit of a stretch perhaps, but we could chalk it up to poetic license. Meanwhile, the word “roadway” (like “poignance”) is nonstandard and evidently chosen to fit the meter, and also doesn’t rhyme very well with “boldly,” but this is nitpicking. My main issue with this poem, which is the same issue I had with the others, is that it doesn’t give the reader enough context to really understand some of the basics: that there’s an easy option (Wildcat Canyon) and a harder one (El Toyonal + Lomas Cantadas).

Perhaps as a victory lap, Copilot offered to write two more versions with slightly differing tones (the last being a drinking song). These weren’t actually as good as the first so I won’t bother dissecting them, but I did like the final couplet in one of them. I decided that since Copilot’s initial poem was good enough to warrant refining, I would point out its central error and let it try again (using the new couplet). Here’s its revised version:

Caprice on the Hills

Wildcat is gentle, a steady road climbing,
Toyonal rises with crueler intention.
Still I turn left in a rash intervention,
Mocking the voice that would counsel good timing.

Freedom is folly, a dare to my reason,
Choosing the torment that makes no good sense.
Pain is a jest and its cost the expense,
Glory is born of capricious decision.

Madness is mettle, a jest I renew,
Lomas Cantadas — I suffer for you.

Again, it’s not perfect. The bit about “turn left” doesn’t really make sense without more context. And what is meant by “counsel good timing”? There is no timing here. In addition, the phrase “its cost the expense” seems redundant. But those matters aside, the meter is solid, the rhyming consistent, and that final couplet is a real banger.

These AI chatbots always seem to want to extend the dialogue and provide more and more and more, which is kind of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, as human beings we should always be working to limit our time online and get out there in the world, right? On the other hand, refining what we get from chatbots is pretty key to making them an effective tool. So when Copilot asked if I’d like it to craft a prose introduction to the poem, I suddenly had another idea: what if I asked it to now create its own footnotes? This post is long enough already so I won’t post them here, but let me say that Copilot did a pretty good job on that.

And here is where I see this AI having a role with a real human writer (at least at the student or blogger level): it could probably help with writer’s block simply by producing something worth polishing. It kills me to concede this, actually, and I am far too proud to ever resort to this kind of “Hamburger Helper” approach to my own writing. But honestly, a cyclist who would like to compose a ride-themed poem in dactylic trimeter, replete with footnotes, could do worse than to start with Copilot. (Neither poem above truly passes muster, but taking the best of each, and from perhaps a few more attempts, and then replacing all the weak parts with our own lines, would be easier than—albeit still inferior to—starting from scratch.) The output of such an exercise might actually have some value, versus the writer getting frustrated, giving up, and producing nothing.

Crucially, the thing the AI will never be able to do is go on the bike ride, have that experience, and grasp what is important about it. So a human could start there and then get some help from AI in expressing himself or herself, since not everyone has the luxury of a liberal education. If AI is called upon to bridge that gap, the current Copilot is far better poised than Gemini and ChatGPT, I think we can now conclude.

If you read my last post, you may recall that Copilot did the best job of these three chatbots at writing a scholastic essay as well. Keep an eye on this one … Microsoft, through its partnership with ChatGPT’s OpenAI as well as its own resources, seems to be ascendant.

Other albertnet posts on A.I.

• I, Chatbot
• Almost Intelligent – Part I
• Almost Intelligent – Part II
• Smartphones & Artificial Stupidity
• A.I. Smackdown – Moto vs. Cortana vs. Siri
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 1
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 2
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 3
• A.I. Smackdown – English Major vs. ChatGPT – Part 1
• A.I. Smackdown – English Major vs. ChatGPT – Part 2
• Schooling ChatGPT
• Will A.I. Steal Our Jobs?
• Tech Check-In - How Good is the Latest A.I.? - Part I
• Tech Check-In - How Good is the Latest A.I.? - Part II
• What is ChatGPT Great At (and Not)?
• Tech Reflection – Two Sides of AI
• AI Smackdown – ChatGPT vs. Copilot vs. Gemini

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Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.     

AI Smackdown - ChatGPT vs. Copilot vs. Gemini

Introduction

Chances are you use ChatGPT.  OpenAI’s chatbot had about a year head start on competing large language models like Google’s Gemini and Microsoft’s Copilot. The latter two offer integration with office productivity suites and man this paragraph is getting boring! Don’t worry, I’ll narrow the focus: in this post I pit these AI chatbots against one another in carrying out identical tasks: an essay and a picture. (Next week I’ll have them write a poem.) These tasks are  probably not what you use chatbots for, but I think they’re a good measure of the AIs’ so-called intelligence, which—in the face of all this uncertainty of where AI is going and what it means for humanity—is probably more interesting than noting how well they answer basic questions or perform routine tasks like writing emails or reports.

(Wondering about the picture? I’ll get to that.)

Now, if you’re an astute reader (which you are or you wouldn’t be here, so congratulations), you’ll be wondering, why even bother evaluating the current capabilities of a technology that is evolving so fast? Wouldn’t this post have a very short shelf life? Those are good questions and here’s my (kind of) short answer: it’s because it’s fun to capture a moment in time and look back on it later, to see how far we’ve come. It’s like watching really old Hollywood movies and appreciating a) how much better the dialogue is in modern film, and b) how much less sexist Americans are now. (Yes, we’ve still got a long way to go, but looking back can help us feel grateful for the progress that’s been made.)

Let me give you an example of how primitive early AI was. As it’s theoretically possible for you to have noticed, I’ve been tracking its progress since 2012, when I tried out Cleverbot. Over the next few years I evaluated the AI used in smartphones. In 2020 I did a test drive of the very first version of OpenAI’s GPT. As described here, all it could do was finish your sentences; you’d type the first half of a sentence and hit tab, and it would finish the sentence for you (as many modern text editors now do). Here’s how the original GPT “helped” me write a short essay about learning to type. I’ve formatted its output in bold italics so you can see what it contributed:

“Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs” is a cool way to pass the time. It is particularly useful for budding gay men to read the words if they are trying to learn how to type on a computer. … Okay, what’s with this guess that my original text had anything to do with ‘gay? that was definitely a pretty random statement to make but it fit, and … no, it didn’t fit. For A.I. to be useful, it must stick to the ‘gay side of the word.’ No. It must stick to the point. I was writing about a sexual deviant. No, I was not! I was writing about the simple act of learning to use the ‘gay keyboard. Also, A.I., you’ve twice screwed up on putting a space between my legs. Okay, fine. I give up. This GPT technology obviously has a lot of potential.

What a gas, right? Of course AI will keep getting better, to the point that what’s considered amazing today will one day seem laughably primitive. Who knows, perhaps you’ve found this post years after I wrote it, and are looking to it to help you remember what it was like to interact with AI through a cumbersome keyboard, rather than having it read your mind automatically via WiFi 12 or 8G cellular technology.

Okay, down to brass tacks. In this post I will evaluate the latest versions of three leading AI chatbots: OpenAI’s ChatGPT (version GPT-5); Google’s Gemini (version 2.5 Flash and Pro); and Microsoft’s Copilot (version Smart GPT-5, based on Microsoft’s collaboration with OpenAI, which Copilot tells me “[goes] far beyond what you’d get from GPT-5 alone”).

Why a scholastic essay? Because that kind of writing is a lot harder than a lot of what AI does, which is just being a really good natural language search engine. Analyzing a large text and writing about it clearly requires something closer to real thought than just fielding a fairly specific question, harvesting the best existing resources on the topic, and mashing them into a concise and nicely formatted answer. For more on the fundamental difference between writing “thoughtfully” and merely researching, see my last post.

Activity #1: academic essay

Much of the hype around AI is its ability to do college kids’ work for them. In a shocking New Yorker article I read recently, a college professor interviewed several students at top universities about their shameless use of A.I. to write their papers, and how well they’re getting away with it. Here’s a crazy example:

A sophomore at Columbia studying computer science told me about a class where she was required to compose a short lecture on a topic of her choosing. “I just put it in [to an A.I. platform] and I maybe edited like two words and submitted it,” she said. Her professor identified her essay as exemplary work, and she was asked to read from it to a class of two hundred students. “I was a little nervous,” she said. But then she realized, “If they don’t like it, it wasn’t me who wrote it, you know?”

So, is the current AI really good enough for the Ivy Leagues? Or at least good enough for your kid’s high school English class? Two and a half years ago I asked ChatGPT (version GPT-3.5) to write an essay describing the use of dramatic irony in a children’s novel, Clarice Bean, Don’t Look Now by Lauren Child. I chose that book because it’s a less cryptic work than, say, Ulysses, which probably nobody, not even James Joyce himself, understood. But even without being written for grown-ups, the Clarice Bean book does feature dramatic irony, as my seven-year-old daughter was able to appreciate. So how did GPT-3.5 do? It crashed and burned, big time, as described here. To see how much the AI has improved, I’ll use the same prompt this time, with the same book.

ChatGPT’s essay

Here is the most salient excerpt of what OpenAI’s GPT-5 came up with:

At the heart of the novel is Clarice’s attempt to navigate friendship, change, and uncertainty. She idolizes her favorite fictional character, Ruby Redfort—a cool, unflappable girl detective who always knows what to do. Clarice, by contrast, often feels helpless when life becomes complicated. Much of the book’s dramatic irony arises from this gap between how Clarice perceives herself and how readers can see her situation. For instance, when Clarice tries to act as confident and worldly as Ruby, her bravado is clearly exaggerated or misplaced. Readers can see that her attempts to emulate Ruby’s poise only highlight her vulnerability. This irony makes Clarice endearing rather than foolish, because we recognize that her misunderstanding stems from innocence and idealism.

This really isn’t bad; I mean, it reads well, the flow is logical, and the essay has the semblance of depth. (It’s a lot better than GPT-3.5, whose entire essay was a hallucination.) Still, this analysis is rather flawed. For one thing, it completely misrepresents Clarice’s character. She actually exhibits no bravado, and puts on no airs. Her behavior is quite subdued; in fact, she withdraws from friends and classmates entirely. Meanwhile, the AI’s essay lacks the specific detail it would need to get a passing grade in a legitimate lit class.

Now, to be fair, much of the power of these chatbots comes from the user’s ability to iterate, guiding the AI with very precise prompts and helping it along when it stumbles. So I gave GPT-5 another chance, the way a TA would with an undergraduate, asking it, “Are there any scenes in particular that really show the dramatic irony, vs. generalizations? What is the best example of this literary device in the novel?” Here’s what it came back with:

The most striking use of dramatic irony in the novel comes when Clarice’s best friend, Betty Moody, suddenly goes missing. Clarice interprets Betty’s disappearance through the lens of her idol, Ruby Redfort … Convinced that something thrilling is afoot, Clarice imagines Betty has vanished into an adventure or secret mission, perhaps with spies involved.

The reader, however, quickly realizes something else: Betty hasn’t disappeared into a mystery, but into a family crisis. Her parents have separated, and Betty has been taken away unexpectedly. Clarice, too young to pick up on the signs of adult conflict, mistakes emotional upheaval for suspense.  This is classic dramatic irony — the audience understands the real reason for Betty’s absence long before Clarice does.

This really would be a classic case of dramatic irony, but there’s one problem: GPT-5 is hallucinating! Betty doesn’t suddenly go missing; she announces to Clarice that her family is moving away, and then they do. There is no mystery for Clarice to solve, no imagined spies or secret mission, and Clarice misunderstands nothing. The chatbot states that the reader knows that Betty’s parents are separating but Clarice doesn’t. This is actually backwards: Clarice only fears Betty’s parents are divorcing, and they’re not. So as nicely written as GPT-5’s essay is, it gets the basic facts wrong. (The only real dramatic irony in the essay is that we know something ChatGPT doesn’t!)

When I challenged GPT-5 on this, the AI casually acknowledged that it may have gotten stuff wrong because it actually hasn’t read the book. It proceeded to fact-check itself using three dubious secondary sources: “TV Tropes,” “Books for Kids Blog,” and “Books for Keeps.” Then it offered, “If you like, I can check for direct quotes from the text to confirm exactly what the author states about Betty’s situation and whether divorce is explicitly ruled out.” WTF?! GPT-5 blithely—and confidently—trotted out this nice essay despite having no access to the source material! What actual student would be shameless enough to try that?

I’m going to give ChatGPT a D on this. This is a big step up from last time, but it still has a long way to go. Obviously an AI would do better with older literature, like the classics that are past their copyright and in the public domain, but I suspect most of its training data will always be other papers and run-of-the-mill critical criticism, not the work of the authors themselves.

Copilot’s essay

On to the next contestant, Microsoft’s Copilot. It has different versions based on what you’re trying to do (e.g., simple search vs. deeper analysis). I engaged Smart Mode for the essay. Here are the highlights:

A central example of dramatic irony emerges in Clarice’s interpretation of Clem Hansson, the new girl at school. Clarice believes Clem is aligning herself with Justin Broach, a classmate Clarice views as a “sociopath.” This assumption fuels Clarice’s isolation and resentment, reinforcing her belief that Clem is shallow and disloyal. However, readers can infer — through subtle cues and Clarice’s unreliable narration — that Clem’s behavior is not malicious, and that Clarice’s judgment is clouded by her own insecurities and grief over Betty’s departure. This disconnect between Clarice’s perspective and the likely reality creates dramatic irony: readers recognize that Clarice is misreading the situation, which deepens our empathy for her while also injecting humor into her exaggerated reactions.

Another layer of dramatic irony stems from Clarice’s obsession with the Ruby Redfort Survival Handbook, a fictional spy guide she consults for advice on navigating life. Clarice treats the handbook as gospel, applying its cryptic wisdom to everyday dilemmas. For instance, she fixates on the idea that “your worst worry is the one you haven’t even thought to worry about,” which paradoxically increases her anxiety. Readers, however, can see that the handbook’s advice is often absurd or irrelevant, and that Clarice’s reliance on it is a coping mechanism rather than a source of genuine guidance. This ironic gap between Clarice’s faith in Ruby Redfort and the reader’s recognition of its impracticality adds both humor and poignancy to the narrative.

Right off the bat, Copilot doesn’t commit any major blunders, in terms of hallucination. I would say the reader only infers that Clem’s friendly gestures toward Clarice are sincere, as we don’t have anything concrete to go on, and Clarice’s hunches aren’t obviously inferior to ours. I also dislike the quotation marks around “sociopath” because they imply that Clarice has Justin figured all wrong, which would be another example of dramatic irony, except that Justin most certainly is a sociopath. (He assaults classmates, extorts them for money, and kidnaps Clem’s pet rabbit.) In my book, Clarice’s mystification at Clem’s interaction with this jerk is understandable and certainly not exaggerated. Moving on to the Survival Handbook, it’s advice is arguably absurd and, on the face of things, irrelevant (as it’s written for spies, not kids), but Clarice does grasp (and point out) its limitations. In a moment of epiphany, she asks herself, “What is the point of reading about all this survival information about lions and tigers and sharks? … And I have read her Spy Guide: How to Know Things Without Knowing Things—and all I have discovered is that I know nothing at all.”

But all this is boring, I know, and the main news is that this essay (or more to the point a version that’s been polished up by a student who at least read the actual book) would probably get a C at UC Santa Barbara, perhaps a C- at UC Berkeley, and who knows, maybe an A at Columbia. But does this mean Copilot is now ready to steal our jobs? No, not yet. If it offered to ghost-write my next albertnet post, I’d politely decline.

Gemini’s essay

And how did Gemini, our final contestant, do? Here are some highlights from its first effort:

The irony primarily revolves around Clarice’s attempts to manage her mounting anxieties—namely her fear of a looming geography test and her worry about her best friend Betty Moody potentially moving away—while remaining oblivious to the humorous and poignant truths the reader recognizes.

The most potent source of dramatic irony is Clarice’s belief that she can control her own anxieties and the world around her by actively not confronting them. The geography test, which Clarice refers to ominously as “the Big Test,” is a persistent undercurrent of dread. She employs elaborate avoidance strategies, from organizing a “Worries Box” to distract herself with minor, manageable tasks. The irony lies in the reader’s understanding that avoidance only amplifies anxiety; the test is drawing closer with every page turned, yet Clarice invests her energy in delaying the inevitable.

The technique is equally effective in building the emotional tension surrounding Betty Moody’s potential move. Clarice views every sign of Betty’s packing or preoccupation through the singular lens of impending abandonment. The reader, however, is frequently given clues—through overheard adult conversations or context within the illustrations—that the situation is more mundane or less catastrophic than Clarice imagines. For instance, the boxes are not necessarily for a long-distance move, but perhaps a temporary one, or simply a major reorganization.

Again, the AI has written an essay that kind of sounds good and might fool somebody unfamiliar with the book, but it ultimately falls down because it has the basic facts wrong. Like ChatGPT, Gemini has no direct access to the full text and is just guessing (well, generating) based on the flotsam and jetsam that critics, reviewers, et al have strewn around the Internet. Gemini’s mistakes are not subtle. For one thing, there is no geography test mentioned anywhere in the book. Meanwhile, Clarice has a worries notebook, not a box, and she doesn’t spend undue time writing in it or employing avoidance strategies. Moreover, there is no scene in the book in which Betty packs boxes for her move, and the situation with Betty is not “more mundane” or “less catastrophic” than Clarice imagines: her best friend literally moves from London to San Francisco.

In the spirit of fairness, I gave Gemini another prompt to try to hone its response and focus on a specific scene of dramatic irony, and it came back with more of the same about the geography test and Betty’s move, adding, “The peak of this irony comes when the news of Betty’s situation is finally revealed, specifically that Betty is not moving away forever, but just temporarily to the apartment upstairs due to a family situation (often related to house renovations).” Completely false, and completely lame.

I pointed out all the errors and asked Gemini if that was really the best it could do. It replied, “The detailed essay you requested on Clarice Bean, Don’t Look Now was written using the Gemini 2.5 Flash model. If you were looking for even deeper, more complex analysis, the Gemini 2.5 Pro model (available with Gemini Advanced) would be the choice optimized for that specific level of complex, multi-step reasoning.” Oh, so if I want a better essay I have to pay for it? What cheek! I almost decided to just give Gemini an F and move on. That would have made this post shorter. But, doggone it, if I’m going to do this, I’d better do it right.

Gemini’s second essay

I switched to version 2.5 Pro (which turns is offered on a limited basis for free) and here’s the gist of its new essay:

The central irony is this: the very “spy” techniques Clarice uses to gain control and uncover the truth are precisely what blind her to it, generating both the novel’s humor and its profound sense of childhood helplessness.

This irony is sharpened in Clarice’s “investigation” of her parents. Overwhelmed by stress (which the reader understands is likely related to their friends’ move, finances, or just the chaos of family life), Clarice’s parents have tense, private conversations. Clarice, filtering these events through her Ruby Redfort lens, interprets them as “clues” to a secret, impending divorce. She misreads their mundane exhaustion as a sinister conspiracy. The dramatic irony is that Clarice’s hyper-vigilance, her constant search for meaning, makes her less perceptive, not more…

Ultimately, the book’s title, Don’t Look Now, serves as the most direct summary of its central irony. Clarice believes her “looking”—her spying and investigating—is the solution. But the reader knows she is refusing to look at the one thing that matters: the deep, painful, and very normal emotion of sadness. She avoids the emotional core of her problem by obsessing over its mechanics.

I have to say, this is much better. Version 2.5 Pro didn’t hallucinate, and its argument is more cohesive. It’s not perfect; for example, it misses Clarice’s epiphany about the limits of the Ruby Redfort book and thus overstates her lack of perception. But this essay so much better than what 2.5 Flash “wrote.”

So is that it, I give Gemini a C+ and move on? Not quite: remember, this chatbot benefited not only from my invoking its 2.5 Pro version, but from all the coaching I gave it in the chat. This distinction is crucial: AI LLMs do much better when you feed them high quality prompts and lots of feedback to supplement their training data. It’s equally important to understand that your input is not itself training data that the model can use going forward. The benefit you provide dies with your session. Thus, AI doesn’t learn and get smarter the way a human would; its progress is much more gradual. Which brings me to:

Gemini’s third essay

To see how 2.5 Pro would do without all the coaching, I opened a fresh session on my work laptop (i.e., totally different login, no history of my chats). (Don’t worry, I did this on the weekend.) (If you’re my boss reading this, congratulations on finding my blog, and please consider that my working knowledge of AI is surely valuable in the workplace and you should give me a raise.)

I guess I wasn’t surprised that 2.5 Pro didn’t do so well this time, but what did surprise me is just how badly it crashed and burned. Here’s an excerpt:

The plot is set in motion by a catalyst of deliberate misinterpretation. A cryptic, unsigned letter containing the vague warning, “something terrible is going to happen,” is received not as a piece of misdelivered junk mail but as a profound, personal omen… The humor is generated directly from this disparity; the audience … understands that the “terrible” event will be domestic, not devastating. The characters’ frantic preparations—installing locks, suspecting neighbors—are thus rendered as escalating absurdities, a performance for an audience that already knows the final act.

OMG, it’s the worst essay yet: total hallucination. There is no cryptic letter in this novel, no locks installed, no suspicion of the neighbors. I called this out, the chatbot apologized profusely for having accidentally based its essay on a different book entirely, and then it tried again:

The gap between perception and reality generates the novel’s central tension. While Clarice is hunting for evidence of international espionage, the audience is processing signs of a painful family separation. The “mysterious man” Karl meets is not a sinister agent, but, as the reader strongly suspects, his father.

Again, pure hallucination! There is simply no “mysterious man” in the entire book. I challenged the chatbot, asking how it gets its source material, both when a work is under copyright and when it’s in the public domain. Gemini explained that for public domain works its training data contains the full texts and also “the centuries of critical, scholarly, and secondary sources,” and for copyrighted works “is built from secondary sources … book reviews, detailed plot summaries, fan wikis, essays, and educational matters about the book.” So basically it’s amateur hour: the AI can’t really differentiate between, say, an esteemed college professor and a (gasp!) lowly blogger. As you can see this doesn’t always work so well. I’m going to give Gemini 2.5 Pro a D+.

As an aside that perhaps ought to be my thesis, I’d like to point out that the better AI gets at writing student papers, the worse off students—and the whole institution of higher education—will be. After all, the point isn’t for students to edify their instructors through their observations; the point is for the students to think and write for themselves. Yes, this is hard, but the right kind of hard, and through this struggle they ideally learn how to think and write, and can one day contribute in the realms of actual, non-student writing such as books, articles, or—worst case scenario—blogs.

Activity #2: original art

I’ve tinkered a lot with AI-generated art, usually to generate pictures to run at the top of my blog posts. It’s been pretty hit-or-miss; a picture which doesn’t stray into uncanny valley territory, or commit a major gaff like the wrong number of fingers on a hand, is all I’ve realistically hoped for. Today’s exercise is simple: I pitted the platforms against one another in the task of creating a picture for this post, featuring Clarice Bean. You can see the winner at the top, though you might cry foul: the art I ended up using is from Whisk, Google’s latest “experimental” imagine generator. I resorted to this new tool because I just wasn’t happy with the runners-up, as you shall see.

ChatGPT’s art

I asked ChatGPT, “Can you make a drawing for me of Clarice Bean reading albertnet on her tablet?” Not surprisingly, it mentioned the copyright and said, “I can’t generate or reproduce images of her or derivative works featuring her likeness” but offered to “generate an image of a cartoonish, freckled, red-haired girl reading a tablet, in the style of a children’s book illustration, but not resembling or referencing Clarice Bean specifically.” I agreed and here’s what it came up with:

I think you’ll agree that’s just about the most boring picture ever. It also has the classic issue of the subject holding the tablet backwards. This is just not that hard a prompt … what gives?

I said, “Make it a more realistic picture, please, and she should look a bit older, and have her in an armchair in her attic bedroom with a desk lamp, and reading the Ruby Redfort Survival Guide.” Maddeningly, the chatbot came up with a picture that was almost perfect, except that made her look a bit too old (about 15) and gave her Instagram-worthy boobs, which seemed inappropriate and unseemly. The picture didn’t show a lot of skin, but still … totally unusable (and I don’t even want to post it here because it’s in such poor taste). I replied, “Please make her a bit younger and flat-chested.” The chatbot chided me: “I can’t modify or generate an image based on physical or anatomical details like that.” Like it was basically calling me pervy! It even offered to “create a child-appropriate illustration,” as though I’d asked for something that wasn’t. Sheesh.

Copilot’s art

I gave Copilot the same initial prompt I’d given ChatGPT, and here’s what it came up with:

This is almost as boring as ChatGPT’s picture, and for some reason it looks faded and I couldn’t get Gemini to fix that. At least the tablet is facing the right way. Note that Clarice is wearing the same red-and-white-striped shirt in this picture as the ChatGPT version of her, which is curious given that such a shirt appears nowhere in any of her books (at least that I can find). It’s actually the shirt Waldo wears, which I’d prove to you if I could only find him.

Other similarities of this art include the hair being the same length, the art having the same level of detail (barely more than a cartoon), and a complete absence of any details in the background. In delivering the picture, Copilot said, “Here you go - a stylized, collage-like illustration of a child reading a tablet, inspired by the playful textures you mentioned.” I don’t know what it means by collage-like, and I didn’t mention any “playful textures.” Whatever, chatbot.

Gemini’s art

I gave exactly the same art to Gemini, and it produced the corniest, least aesthetically pleasing picture yet:

Obviously this is a matter of taste, but would you agree there is no charm here? And what’s with the red-and-white-striped shirt appearing here, too? What are these AIs keying off of?

In Gemini’s defense, at least the little thought bubbles bear a slight resemblance to some of the art in the actual book. But again the tablet is backward and “albertnet” is spelled “alphabertnet” (weird misspellings being a common screw-up with AI art).

Frustrated by not having any good art yet, I tried ImageFx, another Google AI tool, and it gave me a photo-style picture with lavish detail, featuring both Ruby and her brother rocking red-and-white-striped shirts. I think it’s some kind of global AI conspiracy. What a relief when Whisk broke the cycle and generated the worthy picture you saw at the top of this post. I particularly like how Clarice is kind of staring off into space instead of at the book, clearly either pondering what she’s just read or distracted from her book by all the difficulties she’s working through.

Well, at long last that’s it for today. Tune in next week because I plan to pitch these chatbots against one another again, this time writing poems in dactylic trimeter based on the best prompt an AI was even given.

Other albertnet posts on A.I.

• I, Chatbot
• Almost Intelligent – Part I
• Almost Intelligent – Part II
• Smartphones & Artificial Stupidity
• A.I. Smackdown – Moto vs. Cortana vs. Siri
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 1
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 2
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 3
• A.I. Smackdown – English Major vs. ChatGPT – Part 1
• A.I. Smackdown – English Major vs. ChatGPT – Part 2
• Schooling ChatGPT
• Will A.I. Steal Our Jobs?
• Tech Check-In - How Good is the Latest A.I.? - Part I
• Tech Check-In - How Good is the Latest A.I.? - Part II
• What is ChatGPT Great At (and Not)?
• Tech Reflection – Two Sides of AI

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Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Tech Reflection - Two Sides of AI

“This Halloween, I’m dressing up as generative AI. I’m going to show up to the party without a costume and just start stealing pieces of other people’s outfits.”
— An X dispatch my niece screenshotted for me

Introduction

Is AI the amazing new technology that’s changing the world, or a petty thief that just steals people’s ideas and passes them off as its own? Does it actually carry out anything approaching thought, or is it just a zombie, stalking humans’ digital relics and muttering “brains … brains … brains” as it angles to get a piece of us?

In this post, I examine the two most fundamental functions AI chatbots can carry out, and draw a distinction between the two. I believe this can give us useful guidance in deciding how we ought to use this game-changing technology.

Ecclesiastes vs. Barthelme

AI is evolving fast, perhaps faster than our ability to understand it. I’m having to adapt; for example, I’ve stopped spelling it “A.I.” because leading media outfits like The New Yorker and The New York Times have now eschewed the periods. So if you’re reading this on your phone in a sans serif font you may have initially thought I was writing about there being two sides of Albert or Alfred. I asked ChatGPT what to do about this ambiguity between a capital “i” and a lowercase “L,” and it suggested I could “kern or tweak the glyphs.” I’m not exactly an expert at kerning glyphs, so I asked the chatbot how. It gave me all kinds of strategies, the best one for my blog format (HTML) being this:

AI <!-- default -->

A<span style="letter-spacing:0.05em;">I</span> <!-- slightly looser -->

So you can see, GPT is right there with an answer when queried about a technical operation that has been done before. But what about doing something creative and original? This is a fundamental distinction and I am going to propose we look at AI from two largely separate perspectives, for which I’ve invented labels:

• Operational mode – I thought about calling this Ecclesiastes mode, for “no new thing under the sun.” This mode is about helping with a nuts-and-bolts operation (e.g., HTML scripting, DNS routing) that somebody else, probably many people in fact, already figured out and documented out there on the Internet for AI to gobble up, distill, pretty up, and present. Here, AI is basically a really good large language model that excels at combing through gobs of chaff to find answers, and organizes and summarizes information very clearly. I wouldn’t say it’s as parasitic as what’s suggested by the X epigram above, because lots of people freely post technical stuff to the Internet just to be helpful, without thinking of it as sacrosanct intellectual property.
• Creation mode – I think of this as Barthelme mode, named for the writer Donald Barthelme, because I think he’s the epitome of totally original, wacky, one-of-a-kind creative types with an absolutely distinctive voice. In other words, this is the intelligence that I am quite convinced AI could never approach. By creation I mean using the full capability of your own mind to advance ideas that are new, and yours.

The trouble is, many people don’t make any distinction between these two general areas of AI, so on the basis of its prowess as a natural language search engine, they are be led to believe it can do a perfectly good job at creation mode. And since most people aren’t English majors, and in fact don’t respect English majors, AI platforms get to roll out some pretty inferior writing and everybody thinks it’s genius. (This widespread lack of sophistication is also why McDonald’s makes so much money.)

So what?

For many years, as I’ve lamented at length in these pages, kids have been told all the jobs are in tech, and they need to study STEM. And now, many of the kids who dutifully followed these marching orders are graduating from college with Computer Science degrees and not getting jobs, and tech is laying off gobs of people. Next time I meet a STEM major I’m gonna ask him, “Computer Science? What are you gonna do with that?”

So how did STEM go from meal ticket to a food stamp? Well, I think it’s largely because AI is actually getting pretty good at the operational mode. It writes software so well, all industry needs is a seasoned coder to check it. Will we still have seasoned coders in 20 or 30 years, when all the current ones have retired and nobody has come through the ranks to replace them? Probably not, but that’s a whole other blog post somebody has surely already written. (I did blog about ChatGPT’s prowess with operational mode earlier this year, here.)

So as we look at AI, and particularly its role in our personal and professional lives, I think we need to ask ourselves what we have to offer that is rare and valuable, and how AI can help. Specifically, I believe we should be asking the question: how do we use operational AI to handle rote stuff, so we have more time to develop our unique, original ideas—so as to bring out our inner Barthelme?

What to use AI for

I have to confess, I love AI for light research when I’m blogging. The kernel of my posts always comes from my own brain, usually from pondering all kinds of things while I’m out on a solo bike ride. But ChatGPT is a great way to chase down and pinpoint something I had vaguely committed to memory. For example, when working on a recent post I asked it, “Can you track down the Lore Segal quote from ‘Her First American’ about ‘protocol is the art of not doing what comes naturally’?” I probably could have found this with Google, but the AI helped (and might have been indispensable here had I not remembered the name of the novel). ChatGPT was also super helpful when I was writing my post on induction ranges, in researching certain facts (e.g., energy efficiency info and whether government rebates are available).

AI is also pretty helpful at work, where I use a “walled garden” version my employer provides. (It doesn’t use any of my chats as training data for the AI’s ongoing education.) In fact, my employer exhorts all us employees to use AI every day. It’s like with any great tool: we’re expected to work more efficiently because we have it, so we’d better use it well. Recently, I took several product specification documents for different Internet hardware devices, fed them into an AI utility, and asked it to read them all, highlight the differences among the different makes and models, and tell me which one I want for xyz purpose. This was much faster than poring through everything myself, which is a decidedly operational task. The report it generated was clear and reasonably concise, and probably won’t be read very carefully anyway. In fact, someone will probably upload it to a chatbot and have it summarized. All this is fine with me.

One other great use for AI chatbots is to ask them for instructions for quotidian technical matters in your personal life, like disabling the child lock on your new microwave oven, charging your new bike’s electronic shifting, or restoring your playlist after updating your smartphone’s MP3 app. Sure, these are things you could look up on YouTube, but often that search can be tricky, and the videos can be agonizingly slow. The following video tutorial, which is crisp and concise and beautifully shot, is perhaps the exception that proves the rule:

I guess one benefit with YouTube is it’s less likely to hallucinate. I asked ChatGPT if my bike’s brake/shift levers have button cell batteries, and it explained in great detail how there are actually wires running from the battery pack to each lever, so they get recharged along with the derailleurs. The chatbot even drew me a nice diagram to illustrate this. Alas, it was hallucinating: the levers totally do have button cell batteries that need to be periodically replaced.  But all this being said, it’s easy enough to sanity check this kind of output, and I usually get a good answer from AI when I can’t locate a product owner’s manual or don’t feel like leafing through the 50-page one that I have, trying to get past the 14 foreign language versions.

What NOT to do with AI

I think where people get into trouble with AI is when they try to get it to do their work for them, particularly writing documents or correspondence that they then pass off as their own. In some cases this is an ethical or even legal matter; as I described here, the New York Times is suing OpenAI for copyright violation, and I have firsthand evidence of ChatGPT essentially plagiarizing this blog. But I doubt you overmuch care about that. There are two bigger issues, I think:

• What this “creation mode” usage does to the quality of “your” writing
• What it does to the quality of your thinking

There’s this notion that you can ask a chatbot to write something for you, anything from an email to an invitation to a work report, and then you can just polish it up a bit, and you’re done. No more writer’s block! No more outlines, or worrying how to organize your thoughts! That might be okay for a very basic report, like what I described comparing features of tech hardware. But when you start from scratch with your own document, you’re not just leveraging AI’s impersonal, sprawling training data; you’re using your own—everything you’ve experienced, heard, read, and dreamt of. It’s your own personal muse, not the generic Internet one.

Honestly, for anything loftier than a rote technical document—that is to say, anything designed to edify, persuade, or entertain—haven’t you seen for yourself how AI can fail? Like, you’ll get this chipper invitation to a family reunion and it’s using corny phrases like “drum roll please” and joking about your family’s dance moves, and it just seems generic and clichéd? That’s all AI can do. It doesn’t know you or your family or friends well enough to say anything truly clever, and all the polish you want to give its rough draft won’t help. Your invitation will never have real style, along the lines of, “L— gets dibs on the guest room (which she may still anachronistically refer to as “her” “bedroom”) and its magnificent new king-sized guest bed. If you’re nice she might invite you to a slumber party there. Other guests can fight over the legendary Futon of Sand down in the home office. Beyond that, we have two large sofas for those interested in the college-esque party-‘til-dawn experience. We would not be offended if one or more parties were to seek a motel/hotel/AirBNB/VRBO, especially given the relatively small number of bathrooms here (i.e., one). Regarding rumors that the men are encouraged to pee in the backyard, this is true, but please stick to the planting beds and the fountain.” See how much better that is?

Now, you might be thinking, “Wait, I’m not a blogger and I wasn’t an English major. Cranking out an email or an essay may be easy enough for Dana, but I just want to get this task done and checked off.” But stop and think for a moment: what would you like to be good at, in life? Please tell me the answer isn’t just “typing good prompts into AI.” Wouldn’t you like to be articulate, interesting, and capable of thinking on your feet? Because what are you going to do at a cocktail party, or a job interview, or a non-virtual work meeting, when you don’t have a chatbot to help you, and that’s the habit you’ve let yourself fall into? The reality is, we get good at thinking by struggling to do it, for ourselves, the old fashioned way.

So let’s not undervalue written communication by outsourcing it to AI. The best case scenario is that it’ll do an inferior job, replacing what could have been original thought with a pile of trusty clichés and/or stealthily plagiarized, slyly anonymized content. The worst case scenario is that it’ll actually get good enough that you never have to write for yourself again, and your brain can atrophy to the point that you’re not even a thinker anymore … just a chatbot operator.

Because you don’t care

Gosh, I guess I drifted into high-and-mighty, pompous, full-on pontification there, and I feel pretty sheepish about it! Fortunately, I’m realistic enough to sense you snickering, and I know you’re going to turn right around and keep on using AI for whatever you can possibly think of. That being the case, check back next week because I’m going to catch you up on the latest AI technologies and how much they’ve improved since my last check-in. Whether your chatbot of choice is ChatGPT, Gemini, or Copilot, I’ll have you covered. Until then, I’ll be getting back to what I really enjoy in life: kerning glyphs.

Other albertnet posts on A.I.

• I, Chatbot
• Almost Intelligent – Part I
• Almost Intelligent – Part II
• Smartphones & Artificial Stupidity
• A.I. Smackdown – Moto vs. Cortana vs. Siri
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 1
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 2
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 3
• A.I. Smackdown – English Major vs. ChatGPT – Part 1
• A.I. Smackdown – English Major vs. ChatGPT – Part 2
• Schooling ChatGPT
• Will A.I. Steal Our Jobs?
• Tech Check-In - How Good is the Latest A.I.? - Part I
• Tech Check-In - How Good is the Latest A.I.? - Part II
• What is ChatGPT Great At (and Not)?

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Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

When Your Loved One Buys a Juicer

Introduction

Today I tackle the unpleasant topic of what to do when a family member or close friend has purchased a juicer. This is a trying ordeal for all involved, and if not handled properly can lead to a host of negative outcomes up to and including complete estrangement. If someone close to you has already purchased a juicer, perhaps it’s not too late for this post to help. And if such a purchase hasn’t happened yet, don’t be naïve: it can happen to anyone, even you.

Why do people buy juicers?

When a person buys a juicer, it’s tempting to think a normal consumerist impulse is in play: a friend has one, it was on sale, etc. Don’t be fooled: the juicer purchase occupies an entirely different realm than, say, the harmless acquisition of a food processor or “bullet” style blender. To understand why an otherwise reasonable person would buy something that does not have, and cannot have, any utility whatsoever, you need to delve into how the brain works and how a this kind of destructive behavior can be essentially “programmed.”

On the face of it, such “programming” doesn’t look so different from regular advertising, with its slick photo or video showcasing a product to good effect, usually including an attractive person (whether a celebrity endorser, a model, or social media influencer) who creates mimetic desire in the consumer. But in reality, promotion of a juicer is far more sophisticated, and the campaign is deployed extremely precisely to capture the consumer at his or her very most vulnerable.

Remarkably, instead of seeking out a person who is emotionally isolated and has low self-esteem, juicer marketers use every modern technology available (e.g., tracking cookies or pixels, sentiment analysis within social media posts, etc.) to watch for an uplift in optimism. This is the key vulnerability the juicer industry exploits: the erroneous sense that anything is possible, even making nutritious juices in your own home. The peculiar nature of this scenario makes it very hard for loved ones to spot early warning signs. It’s not uncommon, for example, for a member of the juicer-buyer’s household to later report, “I can’t understand it … she seemed fine, she seemed happy!”

Consequences of buying a juicer

The most commonly feared consequence of a juicer purchase happens to be a myth: that it will lead to constant messes that can be extremely difficult to clean up, particularly when substances like beets, berries, pomegranate juice, and/or turmeric are involved. While this certainly can happen, it isn’t really the central problem, because the reality is, most juicer-buyers only use their juicer once. This might seem outlandish, given how expensive juicers are, but if you’ve ever actually drunk the vegetable liquid produced by this appliance, you’ll immediately understand the rationale for never using it a second time. The reality is, nothing produced by the juicer is actually palatable … it only ever seemed like a good idea. The juicer-buyer will likely intend to use the device periodically, even habitually, but is almost certain to never build up enough gumption to do so.

In fact, the most severe consequence of the juicer purchase is the deep shame that the buyer feels every time he or she sees it in the back of a cabinet. Juicers are not small—in fact, they are the very epitome of the giant, single-function kitchen appliance that home owners should avoid, other examples being the bread machine or electric can opener. (Only a toaster is arguably worth the space.) With most such encumbrances, family members may hope to see it offloaded to Goodwill or some other thrift store—but the juicer, in most cases, will not be. The reason? Cognitive dissonance. The juicer-buyer spent so much on it, he is loathe to admit it’s worthless, and the sunk cost fallacy usually crops up, meaning the family is stuck with this thing for life. And every time the buyer sees it, he is likely to feel subconscious stirrings of regret around not only of the folly of having acquired it, but of the ongoing self-delusion driving him to keep it. Whether or not these feelings bubble up to the surface, the juicer-buyer usually lacks the resolve to squarely confront the problem. Hence the festering shame … the juicer might as well be a scarlet letter.

How to help your loved one 

Of course the juicer-buyer is not only hurting herself. The myriad case histories of these purchases are simply heartbreaking, as entire families are impacted. The buyer’s spouse is bewildered as to not only the extravagant uselessness of the object, but of the purchasing decision having been made unilaterally, with no warning or consultation. Meanwhile, children lose faith in the parent who bought the juicer, in light of this inexplicably reckless behavior, and this can lead to a crisis of trust and consequent feelings of insecurity. Then there’s the clutter of the juicer itself, taking up valuable cabinet or countertop space. But while it’s understandable for family members to feel hurt, we must never forget that the buyer is the central victim. Here are some guidelines for properly handling the situation, so as to avoid further harm.

Lead with empathy

It is understandably tempting to express your incredulity at the act of purchase, without pausing to frame your inquiry carefully. It might seem perfectly reasonable to blurt out, “What part of don’t drink your calories do you not understand?!” Or you might demand, “Why would we throw away the best part of fruit—all that dietary fiber—and consume only the part that’s bad for us!?” But this kind of reaction is a big mistake, on two levels. First, since the buyer already knows deep down inside that he has made a mistake, this will only increase his latent remorse. Second, this antagonistic confrontation may drive the buyer into deeper denial, while fanning the flames of what is bound to be a difficult dialogue that could drag on for years.

Thus, it’s crucial to react with kindness and concern rather than confronting the buyer aggressively. Let her tell her story, and try to validate her position. “So … this juicer,” you might begin. “Are you envisioning making delicious and nutritive smoothies for the family?” You might be surprised to learn that your innocent assumption—that she was planning tasty shakes with fruit juice, yogurt, and nuts—was dead wrong, and that she’s planning to go straight to making vegetable drinks, even something with kale. Don’t kid yourself: juicers are not just blenders on steroids. They are specifically designed and marketed to exploit the rare but powerful delusion that vegetable-based beverages are drinkable. 

As disturbing as this is, try to be patient and supportive as your loved one explains her dedication to the family’s health, and the benefits of leafy greens high in vitamins K and A, antioxidants like quercetin and kaempferol, and omega-3 fatty acids. When she describes how much easier juicing is than making a salad, try not to immediately contradict her by pointing out how hard a juicer is to clean, especially given its oleophilic plastic bowl and dome. Remember, this buyer is already in a highly vulnerable state … if she weren’t, she wouldn’t have bought the juicer in the first place! So instead, as strange and inappropriate as this may feel, thank her for thinking of the family’s health. Remember, if you’re going to eventually pick up the pieces and move on, you need her to feel like you’re on her side.

Let the juicer-buyer fail

It can be so hard to just stand by and watch a loved one fail, but in the case of a juicer, it’s actually the best thing you can do. If the purchaser perceives a battle of wills between the two of you, his judgment is bound to be further clouded. Just watch and wait, and when that first batch of kale, cucumber, carrot, and beet concoction comes out, accept the proffered glass willingly. (Honestly, you have no choice anyway.) Promote the drink to the children enthusiastically, as though they don’t sense your skepticism. And then: pretend to enjoy it. Don’t worry, you won’t be working against yourself, for the simple reason that you will inevitably come up short in your play-acting. Not even Edward Norton or Frances McDormand could pull off a realistic impression of someone enjoying a vegetable beverage. Your vain attempt to avoid wincing, grimacing, puckering, or even gagging, and the pleasant smile you try to arrange, will be duly noted. In fact, you will be invoking the juicer-buyer’s empathy.

Extend this strategy to the clean-up. Don’t offer to wash the juicer, no matter how badly you may want to get it out of your sight so you can begin trying to put the entire wretched affair behind you. Let the sprawling apparatus just sit there on the counter, its clear dome spattered with green flecks, looking like somebody actually projectile-vomited inside it. Work around the juicer using the limited remaining counter space, and in fact let the buyer see you being a good sport about it: that is, let her sit with the consequences. If you give in and wash the juicer for her, you’re being an enabler. And if cleaning the kitchen is normally your job anyway, do a poor job with the juicer. Let the residue of beet juice, coconut milk, and/or flax seeds adhere to the sides … the juicer-buyer needs to see all this. (And if the juicer gets put away without being up to your normal standards of cleanliness, don’t fret. Bear in mind it will never be used again anyway.)

Be alert to collateral damage

If you have children, watch for any warning signs that they are coping poorly. Seeing a juicer in action, and knowing it was purchased intentionally, may cause them to doubt the foundation of reliable, competent parenting they rely so heavily upon. If necessary, have a private conversation with your kid(s), emphasizing that anyone can make a mistake like this under certain circumstances. Make this a teachable moment about the evils of targeted advertising campaigns and the ruthlessness of corporations in exploiting our vulnerabilities. Draw attention to your spouse’s overall track record, emphasizing how this behavior truly was an anomaly. And remind your kid(s) that, as hard as it may be to believe, your spouse had the best of intentions and a sincere belief this was in the family’s best interest.

How to move on

While it’s understandable to seek closure in a situation like this, consider that it should not come at the cost of the juicer-buyer’s humiliation. Put this purchase in the proper perspective: your family is only out a few hundred bucks. Don’t get me wrong, “only” does seem preposterous in the context of a totally worthless appliance, but in the big scheme of things, it’s not that big a deal. After all, your loved one didn’t take in a violent rescue dog with expensive health problems, or get scammed into investing in fraudulent cryptocurrency. Just bide your time, let the juicer molder away in a back cabinet, and reflect on all your loved one’s fine qualities. And remind yourself that all kinds of people buy juicers … you just never hear about it. Humans are not perfect. We all make mistakes.

Now, depending on various factors—the level of rapport you have with your loved one; her overall mental health; her sense of humor—it may be possible to ease the ongoing emotional burden of this purchase with a little levity. Coming across the cursed appliance, you might say, brightly, “Oh, the juicer! We should do another veggie beverage!” This is risky, of course, if you don’t get the tone exactly right. Imagine how distressing it would be if your loved one thought you were serious. It is probably safer, if you try humor at all, to be a bit more vague. For example, the next time the family suffers a major setback, you could say, “Well, at least we still have our juicer.” Again, this is a risky move, as it could be construed as sarcastic, and adding insult to injury. Remember, the purchase of this juicer will haunt your loved one for years … I would always err on the side of caution.

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