2025 in Review - The Quiz

Introduction

As I close out 2025, I want to give my readers a little quiz about the topics I covered on albertnet over the past year. You can consider this quiz open-book (because after all, how could I police this)? 

Now, you might recall that I did a similar quiz four years ago, which might have annoyed you because all the multiple-choice answers were correct—that is, it wasn’t a quiz at all, but a farce. Well, fear not: this time there’s really only one right answer per question. And you don’t have to wait until next week for the answers … they’re right down at the bottom of the post. As a special bonus, I will award a merchandise prize to the first reader who gets a perfect score and reports it to me by clicking here. (Obviously you’re on the honor system here...)

2025 in Review – The Quiz

1. Which of the following is not a New Year’s Resolution that I recommended last January?

a) Get control of your dog – If you are a dog person, it might come as a real surprise to you that what you consider either adorable or at least lovably rambunctious misbehavior is actually a drag for grouches like me. For example, I’m out for a walk and your dog comes bounding over to me and tries to run up my body, his front paws raking my legs and groin, and you call out, “Don’t worry, he’s friendly!” And I’m thinking, fine, you’re probably friendly too, but would you windmill me like this?

b) Take better care of your teeth – If you don’t always brush, and/or seldom floss, then it’s time to face the fact that your teeth and gums are probably disgusting. If your parents spent a fortune on orthodontia, it’s a shame that you’re taking such poor care of their investment. And if you didn’t get orthodontia, your teeth need all the help they can get.

c) Stop wearing a COVID mask alone in your car – In the early days of the COVID lockdown when nobody know what was going on, we did all kinds of silly stuff, like forensic-grade wipe-downs of shopping cart handles, and wearing a mask in the car. But it never made sense to wear a mask when driving alone, did it? Are you worried you’ll give your car COVID?

d) Stop using my hairbrush – This one really only applies to my younger daughter when she’s home from college. So, L—, to be clear, it’s actually okay if you use my hairbrush on the sly such that I don’t even know about it. But when I have to look for it, I get nervous … what if you took it to a slumber party and lost it? As you know, it’s my oldest possession so I’m inordinately fond of it.

 2. Which of the following is not one of my five recommendations on how to improve your LinkedIn profile?

a) Rework your headline section – Here is an example of a good Headline:

>>Growth | Digital | Generative AI | Culture Cultivator | Mentor | Advocate |Outside the Box | Clarity Bringer | AI/ML | Driving Innovation | Flawless Executation| Podcaster | Olympian | Frontends | Evangelist | Stakeholdering | C++ | pDOOH | Rainmaker |Delivering Scalability| Solutionist

I’m not just supplying that as an example of what a tech worker would list; I’m telling you to literally copy and paste the above into your Headline (except “Executation” which was to make sure you’re paying attention).

b) Create an entrepreneurial vibe – Rank-and-file employees, be they wretched “individual contributors” or pathetic “middle managers,” just don’t get any respect. They’re as despised as tourists. But people love entrepreneurs. The trouble is, we can’t all be entrepreneurs, and if we were, we probably wouldn’t bother to fine-tune our LinkedIn profiles … we’d be whispering right into the ears of angel investors. But there’s another way forward: figure out what other type of –preneur you might be. Choose from the following or invent your own:

• Hellapreneur – like an entrepreneur but better
• Contrapreneur – has a startup that bucks current trends; for example, launches a new flip phone to corner the digital detox market
• Epipeneur – this person is launching a startup despite having a severe peanut allergy
• Codependepreneur – spins his wheels on yet another doomed startup because between him and his partner they’ve convinced themselves this thing is viable
• Saagpaneur – wants to open an Indian restaurant

c) Refine your Experience section and make it data-driven – For example, instead of just saying, “Performed software QA testing,” put, “Via disruptive and visionary software QA testing, reduced operating costs by 37%, saving $2.3 million in one year while improving CSAT scores by 24%.” The recruiter reading this, whose BS detectors will be lighting up like crazy, will think, “Oh, good, he’s also a storyteller! We can always use more of those.”

d) Have an AI chatbot help you revise your profile – As we all know, affinity bias is real. That is, if you and the hiring manager both went to UC Berkeley, you’ll have a leg up. Well, this affects your LinkedIn profile too: since it will only be read by bots, it should be co-written by a bot. Any of these AI LLMs will be sure to prune the unimportant stuff, like how you graduated summa cum laude (because who speaks Latin anymore?).

3. When I solicited advice from ChatGPT about how to monetize my blog, which of the following was not useful feedback that it provided?

a) “Your Blogger page view count is inflated” – The chatbot warned me that, although albertnet received 1.2 million page views in the preceding three months, the vast majority were probably from bots, scrapers, SEO crawlers, and AI training bots, so turning on Adsense would not generate any appreciable passive income

b) “Here is a boilerplate privacy policy for your blog” – When I asked it to help me compose my privacy policy (something I’d neglected to do for like 15 years), it provided a response that was mostly unusable, but did have some good points, and if nothing else prevented writer’s block and paved the way for my own policy, which you can read here and which I’ve linked to in my blog’s footer

c) “Here is what you need to achieve GDPR compliance if your blog uses cookies” – It gave me a nice rundown on what the GDPR requirements are, and I felt I could trust it not to hallucinate because this is such widely available information

d) “Here’s some example HTML script to invoke the traffic tracking” – It spoon-fed me actual HTML that I could paste in to my blog to start tracking various metrics

4. Which of these passages is not from my Ode to Thrifting?

a) A pair of Docs for only forty bucks? / I’ll take ‘em ‘cause they’re only barely used

b) Of course there’s all the stuff you’d never buy / Such pseudo-brands as George and Charter Club

c) Upon the racks of thrift, the brands they lie / Forgotten names that once did softly shine

d) But when I think of forking out full price? / No thanks – I’ll opt for thrift and toss the dice

5. The brutal 105-mile mountain bike ride I did on the Canyonlands White Rim Trail taught me that:

a) If you travel to a sufficiently isolated place like Canyonlands, you can be so dwarfed by giant reddish rock formations towering above you that you never need to see the celestial heavens again, if feeling insignificant is your thing

b) Regardless of how much experience we have, middle-aged cyclists have no business trying to keep up with Division 1 collegiate cross-country runners

c) During two-day driving trips, an all-taqueria-all-the-time approach to dining is totally worth it, even if it causes percussive flatulence that disturbs the much-needed pre-ride good night’s sleep

d) Clif and/or Kind bars are actually inferior to peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for long-distance cycling, especially in the heat

6. Which of the following is not a classic O.G. move, according to the albertnet-featured columnist “Ask an O.G.”?

a) Making pour-over coffee instead of using a Mr. Coffee or (shudder) a Keurig

b) Using a traditional double-edged razor instead of the modern plastic type with the blade cartridges

c) Buying your music on vinyl instead of CD or (gasp) Spotify

d) Sticking with standard bike handlebars and levers instead of the narrow, flared-out bars with goofy levers that stick out like chicken wings

7. Which of the following does not represent my take on the usefulness of locknuts for Presta valves?

a) If you have a commuter bike with Presta valves, use the locknuts or not, at your whim

b) If you have a folding bike, use the locknut because this type of bike tends to actually have Dunlop valves

c) If you have a backup “rain bike” that you mainly ride on the indoor trainer, you better be using noise-canceling headphones, in which case you can use locknuts or not, because who cares if they (or your valves) rattle?

d) For your flagship road or mountain bike, run tubeless with locknuts, and if anybody makes fun of you, send them my Presta valve locknut blog post

8. Which of the following strategies is not among my recommendations for when your loved one buys a juicer?

a) 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. 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.

b) 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.

c) Lead with empathy – 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.

d) When the time is right, “disappear” the juicer – Out of sight, out of mind. Spare your family the ongoing trauma of repeated attempts to make a palatable vegetable beverage. The juicer-buyer may well assume the juicer is just “hiding” and may even feel secretly relieved not to have to try again.

9. I challenged the three leading AI chatbots to write a poem in dactylic trimeter. The topic I assigned was the reckless behavior of choosing to bike up Lomas Cantadas, a brutal climb, just to celebrate one’s radical freedom. Match each passage below with its author: ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, or Dana.

a) Turning to torment, no reason persuades me, / Pain blooms in muscles yet joy is commanding

b) Wisdom, alas, is a flaw when you’re mired / In glory, in notions of being a man

c) This is the freedom to throw all the rules about, / Knowing the payment and what it will cost him

d) Madness is mettle, a jest I renew, / Lomas Cantadas — I suffer for you

10. The term MAMIL—middle-aged man in Lycra—lacks a widely recognized corresponding term for a middle-aged woman in Lycra. Which of the following proposed terms is mine?

a) SOMAT (slightly overweight middle-aged totty)

b) OWL (older woman in Lycra)

c) WILMA (woman in Lycra, middle-aged)

d) MAVIS (middle-aged vixen in spandex)

Answers

Here are the correct answers. 

1. (b) – “Take better care of your teeth” is not one of my suggested Resolutions. Although this is fine advice, I did not propose it in 2025; it’s from my 2018 post about New Year’s Resolutions. [Source: A Scattershot Approach to New Year’s Resolutions ]

2. (d) – “Have an AI chatbot help with your profile” was not one of my suggestions in this post. I don’t actually believe that AI platforms have affinity for one another. (And incidentally, it was a human career counselor who advised me to remove summa cum laude from my LinkedIn profile. I left it in, but translated it to English.) [Source: Five Tips for Improving Your LinkedIn Profile ]

3. (a) – “Your Blogger page view count is inflated.” ChatGPT did not caution me thus. In fact, it was a sucker for raw data and showed a serious lack of skepticism around page view stats. Blithely assuming that page views represented real readers, it calculated that if I were to turn on Adsense, I stood to make about $2,000 a month in passive income from this blog! It did provide a number of caveats, such as how my results might be affected by the geographical location of my readers, the positioning and type of ads, ad targeting, how well ads match my content, user engagement, and so on. But the question of bots vs. human readers didn’t cross its mind until I prompted it very specifically on this. Gemini failed similarly. This kind of “big picture” thinking is a major weakness of AI platforms, I think. [Source: What Is ChatGPT Great At (and Not)? ]

4. (c) – “Upon the racks of thrift, the brands they lie / Forgotten names that once did softly shine.” This was penned by ChatGPT, and shows once again that AI is pretty bad at poetry. Too general, and sacrifices meaning for adherence to the meter. [Source: Ode to Thrifting ]

5. (b) – “Regardless of how much experience we have, middle-aged cyclists have no business trying to keep up with Division 1 collegiate cross-country runners” is not one of my takeaways from this brutal ride. Actually, the young cross-country runners only put the hurt on Peter and me for about the first forty miles. Eventually their rambunctiousness caught up with them, or perhaps it was just the well-earned capacity for endless drudgery that Pete and I have built up over the decades, but we were all equally knackered by the end. [Source: Biking the White Rim Canyonlands Trail With Young Bucks ]

6. (c) – “Buying your music on vinyl instead of CD or (gasp) Spotify” is not something this columnist considers an O.G. move. In fact, he stated, “If a music lover still has the record player he bought as a teenager, and all his original records, plus perhaps a few select purchases to round out his collection, I’d consider that O.G. But when wealthy people buy modern turntables with multi-layer plinths, decoupled motor systems, and carbon fiber tonearms, and painstakingly replace their CD or MP3 collections with pricey records, that’s more of an epicurean thing than O.G. (Not saying it’s bad, mind you. Just not O.G.) [ Source: Ask an O.G. ]

7. (b) – “If you have a folding bike, use the locknut because this type of bike tends to actually have Dunlop valves” is not one of my conclusions from this post. It’s a total red herring here. [Source: Presta Valve Locknuts, aka Valve Rings ]

8. (d) – “When the time is right, ‘disappear’ the juicer” is not one of my recommendations. This would be helping the juicer-buyer to delude herself, instead of facing the fact of her error and learning from it. [Source - When Your Loved One Buys a Juicer ]

9. Here are the authors behind each poem exerpt:

    (a) – “Turning to torment, no reason persuades me, / Pain blooms in muscles yet joy is commanding” – ChatGPT

    (b) – “Wisdom, alas, is a flaw when you’re mired / In glory, in notions of being a man” – Me (from my “Ode to Lomas Cantadas”)

    (c) – “This is the freedom to throw all the rules about, / Knowing the payment and what it will cost him” – Gemini

   (d) – “Madness is mettle, a jest I renew, / Lomas Cantadas — I suffer for you” – Copilot

Once again, AI generally does a fairly poor job of maintaining sense when it’s trying to get the meter right, and Gemini didn’t even get the dactylic trimeter right. The outlier is Copilot which I think did remarkably, perhaps even frighteningly, well. [Source: More AI Smackdown - ChatGPT, Copilot, & Gemini Write Poetry ]

10. (d) – MAVIS (middle-aged vixen in spandex) is the term I suggested. Help me make this a household word! [Source: Ask a MAMIL ]

Scoring

9-10: You are a genius! You probably know this blog better than I do.

6-8: Excellent! You’re either just very good at taking tests, or you actually read my blog pretty faithfully in 2025.

3-5: Solid! It seems you’re actually pretty familiar with albertnet, even if you fell off a bit this past year.

1-2: Good! I’m impressed you made it all the way through the test!

0: Not so bad! Next time perhaps you’ll actually take the test instead of just skimming my post!

<0: You are either magical, a space alien, or an emoticon of a person with a big nose and a goatee.

Did you win?

If you scored a perfect 10, email me here and let me know. If you are the first perfect-scoring reader, I will respond to your email and make shipping arrangements for your special prize!

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

Ask an O.G.

Dear O.G.,

I think driving a stick shift is a total O.G. move and should be respected. My wife says that for me to prefer this “outdated technology” is an “affectation” (her words). What do you think?

John A, Seattle, WA

Dear John,

I have both kinds of car. It’s useful to know how to handle a manual transmission if you ever plan to rent a car in Europe. I also happen to think driving a stick shift is more fun, but it’d be hard to cite that as an advantage to someone disinclined to learn. The important thing is that you mansplain the manual gearshift process to your wife, using terms like “synchromesh” and “double-clutch.” That should get her off the subject so she’ll stop insulting you about your “affectation.”

Dear O.G.,

How are you, a middle-aged white man, gangsta? I can’t believe you call yourself that.

Leslie H, Dallas, TX

Dear Leslie,

The “G” does not necessarily mean gangsta, or even gangster. I wouldn’t even say the “O” is necessarily for “Original.” And the name wasn’t my idea … you should talk to my publisher. (If you can get him to listen to you, I’d love to hear how you accomplished that.) By the way, this is by far the most common question I get. My eyes are rolling as much as yours, believe me.

Dear O.G.,

I’m guessing you’re a vinyl guy, huh?

Amanda T, Los Angeles, CA

Dear Amanda,

Actually—and I hope this doesn’t destroy my O.G. cred—I’ve never owned a record player. I remember a reel-to-reel tape recorder in the ‘70s (outdated even then) that my brothers let me mess around with, but for playing music I had nothing but cassette tapes until I was an adult. CDs came out when I was in high school. The first one I encountered was in my school locker; I was turning the jewel case over and over in my hands trying to figure out what the hell it was when my locker partner happened upon me and burst out laughing. I did buy a CD player when I was in college, but it was to replace the one I borrowed from a pal (so I could play borrowed CDs) which I unfortunately broke. I didn’t start buying my own CDs until my early twenties, but again, that’s not because I ever had records. (Well, I had one: the John Williams score to “Star Wars,” which my parents bought me to play on their stereo.)

Now, if a music lover still has the record player he bought as a teenager, and all his original records, plus perhaps a few select purchases to round out his collection, I’d consider that O.G. But when wealthy people buy modern turntables with multi-layer plinths, decoupled motor systems, and carbon fiber tonearms, and painstakingly replace their CD or MP3 collections with pricey records, that’s more of an epicurean thing than O.G. (Not saying it’s bad, mind you. Just not O.G.)

By the way, if you meant something else by “vinyl guy,” such as attire, you’ve got the wrong guy!

Dear O.G.,

Nothing says O.G. more than a real appreciation for a good wine vintage … am I right? As the oenophile I imagine you to be, what are your favorite harvests?

Terrence H, New Haven, CT

Notwithstanding my very sincere insistence that the G in “O.G” doesn’t exactly mean “gangsta,” I’m really not sure how a fine wine aficionado could be called O.G., even though a respect for tradition is inarguably O. In any case, I’m sorry to disappoint … I don’t know the first thing about wine (though I have tried my level best to fake it).

I’m guessing there’s pretty good overlap between wine and coffee lovers, so I will go ahead and share my opinion about O.G. coffee (even though nobody’s asked). First of all, its polar opposite is the Keurig, which ought to carry as much stigma as chicken nuggets. I consider pour-over to be the best way to make coffee. Until the 1950s it was the main method, but then instant coffee became hugely popular during the convenience-addicted post-war era. That lasted until the ‘70s when cheap electric drip coffee makers became available. Pour-over is becoming more popular, maybe even hip, but I think I can make the case that it’s pre-‘50s O.G. I grind my beans by hand (so I don’t wake up the whole family with the earsplitting noise of an electric grinder), and I use a cone made of porous stone, which isn’t an old technology but sure feels old.

Dear O.G.,

What is your absolute favorite O.G. move, and why?

Far and away the most satisfying O.G. realm for me is using—exclusively—a traditional double-edged razor. This is a product that’s far cheaper than its modern equivalent, does a better job, is better made, looks nicer, and is produced by companies that clearly have no interest in glib, glossy marketing. I’m so fond of my O.G. razor, I wrote an ode to it which you can read here. Thanks for asking!

Dear O.G.,

Getting back to an earlier reader’s question, about music on vinyl: for someone who doesn’t own a record player you sure seem knowledgeable about the modern technology. Do you know whereof you speak?

Keith W, Chicago, IL

Dear Keith,

Not at all, actually. You caught me … I’m a total poseur.

Dear O.G.,

What’s more O.G.: classical art (e.g., Old Masters) or pop (e.g., Warhol, Lichtenstein)? Obviously Leonardo da Vinci was a rockstar, but then, that’s so long ago. Is there an expiration date on O.G.?

Tricia P, San Francisco

Dear Tricia,

I think an endless debate could be had among those two art schools, not to mention all the other ones (e.g., modern, postmodern, contemporary) that would claim they’re the most O.G. I do not want to venture into that fracas. But I think the more important distinction, particularly because so much art isn’t seen in museums, is between human art and A.I. “art” as the latter starts to replace more and more real work, from street fair posters to advertisements to crap you can buy on Etsy. I’m sure you can already sense my position on this; for a full discussion, replete with a drawing challenge I issued to both ChatGPT and my daughter, click here. Suffice to say, A.I. can never be O.G. It’s the antithesis.

Dear O.G.,

I happen to know you’re a veteran cyclist. How does this mesh with your O.G. approach? Do e-bikes, electronic shifting, and disc brakes make you throw up in your mouth?

Robert S, Thousand Oaks, CA

Dear Robert,

I’ll start with your specific examples and then address the bigger picture. I think e-bikes are not only just fine, but probably inevitable for most of us … they may well extend the number of years (and hopefully decades) I can continue to ride. I’m also completely in favor of non-cyclists buying e-bikes for transportation, because even if e-bikes don’t honor the purity of traditional cycling (can you sense my “blah blah blah” here?), they do mean fewer cars on the road. Sure, go on all you want about what a menace these unskilled but fairly high-speed e-bikers present, but I’ll take a 15 mph impact from a 40-pound e-bike over a 25+ mph impact from a two-ton car. (It’s not like e-bikers have cornered the market on roadway incompetence and inattentiveness, after all.) But I will assert two caveats: 1) no kid should ever ride an e-bike (details here), and 2) e-bikes shouldn’t be allowed on nature trails (see here).

Moving on to electronic shifting, I do think it’s a solution looking for a problem, and though I’ve given it two solid auditions (click here and here) the earth didn’t move for me either time. But my next bike will surely have it (it being the new normal), and people seem to like it well enough. Same with disc brakes: I love them on my mountain bike, you can run carbon rims, blah blah blah damn, I’ve even boring myself here.

All this being said, these new road handlebars that flare out, and the goofy brake levers that stick out like chicken wings … they’re hideous. And what’s with the weird fork crowns on BMC road bikes? They look like the fork on a cheap mountain bike! Aesthetics are being sacrificed at the altar of performance and that’s just anti-O.G. So many modern road bikes so dorky, they can even make a guy like Julian Alaphilippe look like a dweeb.

You know who was the O.G. road racer, with a perfect bike to match? Bernard Hinault.

(Don’t even get me started on Jonas Vingegaard’s aerodynamic helmet.)

Dear O.G.,

I think part of being O.G. is just sticking to your guns and not following along with the status quo, like how Eminem won’t use Auto-Tune. Do you live by this kind of credo?

Wanda R, New York City

Dear Wanda,

I think there are two fundamental ways to buck the status quo. You can either observe the conventional wisdom, evaluate it, and decide to reject it—like Eminem—or you can be oblivious to modern trends and just bumble your way along doing whatever seems to work. My favorite example of the latter is my dad, who—despite having been a college instructor in Boulder, Colorado during the late ‘60s—was totally unaware of Birkenstock sandals and, decades later, after failing to observe three huge surges in their popularity, totally thought he discovered them, like they were some obscure thing.

Often I do stubbornly defy the status quo. I think I was the only teenager in Boulder in the ‘80s who didn’t have an earring; I never used Biopace chainrings on any of my bikes; and I eschew all social media (except, begrudgingly, LinkedIn), all in defiance of the norm. But other times I’m willing to follow the status quo but only after considerable delay, out of sheer ignorance. For example, in matters of music, I’ll be barely aware of a band or singer for many years until finally I start to wonder who it is I’ve been hearing, and hearing about, for so long, and then I’ll investigate. I discovered Eminem in 2003 (four years late), Sublime in 2011 (fifteen years late), and The Black Keys in 2023 (twenty-one years late). In the latter cases, I wasn’t defying the zeitgeist … I’d just fallen behind. You might say I was O.G. in the sense of “Oblivious Guy.” (Of course it’s hard to remain ignorant now that we have Spotify. I have a love/hate relationship with it … the ad hoc selections it plays after the end of an album often trick me into listening to really anodyne, soulless stuff for oddly long periods before I suddenly think, “What is this crap!?”)

I wouldn’t say I consider this late-or-never tradition a credo, but it does affect my life. Probably the biggest single effect of finding my own way, without regard to conventional wisdom, was choosing to major in English despite everyone around me (even then) assuring me that with that lowly degree I’d never get a real job. They were wrong then, and they’re wrong now, as I discuss at length here. (My younger daughter is currently earning her English degree, with minors in Art and Philosophy, and I couldn’t be more pleased.)

As for the day-to-day effects of this approach, a big one is how much I use the public library. I just looked at my loan history from the Berkeley library, and in the last 144 weeks I’ve checked out 289 items (books, movies, CDs), for an average of two items a week. That doesn’t even include what I get digitally through Kanopy, Libby, and Hoopla (details here) and from the Albany Library. In a society that’s thoroughly embraced Amazon, streaming platforms, and video games, I think libraries are 100% O.G. And yet I know plenty of adults who don’t even have a library card.

Dear O.G.,

What’s the point of clinging to all these established ways when A.I. is obviously going to change everything over the next decade or so? Preferences that might seem old school and noble now will just become outdated, outmoded, outmaneuvered, and over. Not to be a dick about it, but I think this has to be said.

Ron B, Atlanta, GA

Dear Ron,

You sound like the blowhards gleefully predicting the demise of printed books based on competition from e-books like the Kindle. Society needs a term for people like you … technophiliac, or maybe digitopian. Look, I won’t deny that A.I. is a powerful tool for making many tasks more efficient, but that’s not a purely good thing. I’m all for ChatGPT helping me with HTML scripting or making DNS routing changes, but its essays are a) inferior to a real writer’s, and b) dumbing people down. The very word “essay” is from the French essai meaning a trial, attempt, or test, deriving from the Latin exagium, a weighing or examination. The point of writing an essay is to explore an idea, create and test hypotheses, and ideally learn from the effort even as you’re crafting something others can read. The point of a teacher assigning an essay isn’t to educate herself on a topic via her students’ papers; it’s for the students to grapple with the difficulty of writing and improve their brains. At least, that’s my O.G. perspective. In a shocking New Yorker article I read recently, a college professor interviewed several students at top universities about their blatant use of A.I. to write papers for them, and the success they’ve had (at least, from a grade perspective) in doing this. 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. “It was a class where everyone was guaranteed an A, so 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?”

These students might think they’re pulling a fast one, but what happens when they graduate and still don’t know how to think? How are they going to impress anyone during a face-to-face dialogue—whether it’s a job interview or a cocktail party—when they don’t have ChatGPT to generate insights and pretty sentences for them? No less an O.G. than the rapper Ice-T (whose fourth studio album, “O.G. Original Gangster” helped popularize the term), rapped about the problem of school dropouts trying to sound impressive:

How you gonna drop science? You’re dumb
Stupid ignorant, don’t even talk to me
In school you dropped Math, Science, and History
And then you get on the mic and try to act smart
Well let me tell you one thing, you got heart
To perpetrate, you’re bait, so just wait
Till the press shove a mic in your face…
And they ask you about the game you claim you got
Drop science now, why not?

Notably, he wrote that song in 1989, before an A.I. existed that could enable a useless student to fake his way through school. Sure, modern A.I. can help you get a degree, or program a computer, or write a basic email, but it’s not going to make you an interesting person. Ultimately, thinking for yourself is the real O.G. move.

Dear O.G.,

That last response? And your conclusion, “Thinking for yourself is the real O.G. move”? You’ve got to be kidding me. That’s pretty much the cheesiest thing I’ve ever read. I think in your case O.G. stands for “Old Geezer.”

Dana A, Albany, CA

Dear Dana,

I know. You’re right. You got me. I’m tired. I should really edit my stuff before I post. Looks like that pompous, overblown sentiment slipped past my publisher,  too. Sheesh.

An O.G. is a syndicated journalist whose advice column, “Ask an O.G.,” appears in over 0 blogs worldwide.

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