Autocomplete Zeitgeist Revisited - 2026

Before we begin

In this post, which examines the American zeitgeist, I adopt a tone of playful criticism. Please don’t mistake me for one of those tedious killjoys who only finds fault. Believe me, I am grateful for my country and its people.

Introduction

As everybody knows, Google Autocomplete is a function of Google Search that starts providing feedback even before you’ve finished typing your query. The search engine predicts what you’re looking for based on others’ recent searches across the Internet. I find Autocomplete a good indicator of where people’s heads are, so in a long-ago post I asked Google a range of questions designed to examine the national zeitgeist as of March 31, 2018. Then, exactly four years later, I googled the same questions to see how things had changed and what people sought answers for in 2022. And now, another four years later (to the day), I peer back into Autocomplete suggestions to see where our heads are at in 2026.

(Note: to improve the accuracy of this experiment—that is, to make it more about the American people instead of about me—I turned off “Personal Results,” so my own previous searches won’t influence the suggestions.)

Persecution mania

Four years ago, the query “is it illegal to…” prompted Autocomplete suggestions that included burning money, hitting a girl, and working weekends in France. Today, this same short phrase produces these suggested queries as the top five:

• Is it illegal to write on US currency
• Is it illegal to talk to dolphins
• Is it illegal to drive barefoot
• Is it illegal to collect rainwater in California
• Is it illegal to drive without insurance

Driving barefoot has appeared in the top five for both my previous studies, suggesting that—even though Gen Z doesn’t seem very interested in driving—they’re still interested in this topic. Maybe they’re tired of their parents (or Uber drivers) going barefoot?

Now, this bit about writing on US currency I’ve never seen before, not even in the top ten—it’s completely new. So I asked myself, what’s changed that this is suddenly a #1 concern? The answer is simple: as described here, Donald Trump will soon be the first sitting president in history to have his signature adorn US currency, specifically the $1 bill. Now, I’m not here to take sides in matters of politics, but I think everyone can agree that this presents a tantalizing opportunity for the anti-Trump camp: they naturally want to write something like “sucks” right after his signature. Kind of a tit-for-tat: like, fine, you wanna write on my currency, I’m gonna write on it, too. But to consider actually indulging this temptation begs the question: will I get arrested for this?

If you think I’m being ridiculously paranoid, I’ll just say that a) it’s not necessarily the case that the typical American isn’t paranoid, and b) there is ample precedent to reasonably ask this question. The Donald saw to it that his face is prominently displayed right next to George Washington’s on US National Park season passes, and the backlash created a cottage industry of stickers designed specifically to obscure his picture.

The Department of the Interior reacted by prohibiting these stickers, claiming that they somehow bypass “security features,” and declared that affixing them can invalidate the $80 pass. As related here, this led to companies innovating again, this time with handy sleeves that cover up the picture until it’s time to present the pass to a park ranger. Given the history here, I can’t blame my fellow Americans for being careful.

Now let’s talk about the legality of talking to dolphins. As it turns out, the popularity of this search query is largely Google’s own fault because their AI summary indicates that it basically is illegal to talk to dolphins.

There’s not a direct link between this AI summary and the popularity of the Autocomplete text, but this kind of overstatement tends to get people up in arms, which is exactly what has happened. As described in a legal journal here, “A viral claim spread … suggesting that simply speaking to or near a dolphin is a federal crime.” So a paranoia has emerged about this activity, just like with defacing currency.

I’m going to skip over the rainwater thing for a moment and address “driving without insurance” next. (You’ll see why in a minute.) I am perplexed by these driving-related inquiries given how Gen Z isn’t much into cars. So I dug a little deeper into that, and surfaced this fascinating blog post challenging the popular theories about this generational change in driving behavior. The data do not show that this reluctance to learn to drive is due to the popularity of ride-sharing apps, or teens being too busy studying or doing extracurricular activities that improve their college applications, or because of our tough economic times, or because of increasing rates of depression. All of these explanations are refuted via data going back decades. The author argues, instead, that Gen-Z teens are just growing up more slowly—they’re “less likely to date, have a paid job, drink alcohol, and have sex than teens in previous generations” and that young adults “also take longer to get married, have children, and settle into careers.”

Worrying about having to get car insurance sounds like exactly the kind of grown-up task Gen-Z kids shrink from. I can just sense the eye-rolling and their thinking, “OMG, if I have to get actual insurance just to drive a car, forget about it!”

Could this delayed adulthood miraculously explain the rainwater gathering thing as well? Well, maybe. It could be Gen-Z, while afraid to drink tap water due to widespread mythology about it being unhealthy, also lacks both a car and the grown-up discipline of knocking out errands, and is thus too lazy to head to the grocery store for bottled. Or who knows, maybe young adults are so stunted they forget to pay their water bill. So they’re like, maybe we just put a bucket out back and drink from that … if we’re allowed.

Moving on to a slightly different search, “is it against the law to…” I get mostly the same results, but with these two additions appearing in the top five:

• Is it against the law to burn an American flag
• Is it against the law to not file taxes

Interestingly, flag burning was the very first Autocomplete suggestion eight years ago, but four years ago it didn’t appear at all. So why has this one returned? Well, it may well be a political matter, so let’s look at who was president when I did my two previous studies. My first Autocomplete post was halfway through Trump’s first term, which is when we first saw this burning question (pun intended, couldn’t resist); my second post was halfway through Biden’s term (when this suggestion disappeared); and now, halfway through Trump’s second term, it’s back. I’m not suggesting that Americans are more interested in burning flags during conservative reigns. It could be that the American flag simply figures more prominently in the national dialogue when we have a polarizing, populist president whose followers seem to believe they own this national icon.

In case you think that’s just a pet theory of mine, I did a little light research, and this article describes a 2025 poll of 2,404 U.S. adults on the topic of flags vs. party. (The sample was “weighted to be representative of adults nationwide according to gender, age, race, and education, based on the U.S. Census.”) The poll found, among other things, that forty-two percent of respondents assume a person flying the flag is conservative, whereas only ten percent assume a person displaying the flag is liberal.

I’m not suggesting that liberals want to burn our flag and are making sure this is allowed. I’m also not insinuating that conservatives, fearing that liberals are going to start burning flags, are seeing whether or not they can call the cops. Probably more to the point, when people are politically agitated in general, as they are now, the flag itself and notions of waving vs. desecrating it are more top-of-mind.

Moving on to our next query, “can you be arrested for…,” the top five include “a misdemeanor,” “speeding,” and “driving without a license,” all of which I saw last time. “Driving without insurance” shows up here, too. But I also see a newcomer to the suggestions, which is “can you be arrested for littering in Texas.”

I know my point with this post is to determine what can be inferred about the American zeitgeist from Autocomplete suggestions, but these highly local issues make it tricky. The question is, what happened recently in Texas that would drive this kind of query? I’m generally the wrong guy to ask because I keep my finger as far from the pulse of my fellow man as possible, eschewing all social media and most news sources. Whereas many people have FOMO (fear of missing out), I’m more plagued by “FONMO” (fear of not missing out)—that is, fear of being dragged into pointless gossipy discussions about this or that viral inflammation. But it’s really easy to research such stuff now, thanks (?) to AI chatbots. Claude drew my attention to this article about a cop beating up a woman for littering. Obviously this is a travesty, but worrying whether or not it’s illegal to litter seems to be missing the point. If this is how people fact-check before joining an online dialogue, I doubt they’re really in a position to fix the problem. It’s likely just more performative outrage.

Mercifully, since I have a lot to cover here, suggestions to complete the query “can you be arrested for…” haven’t changed since four years ago so I can skip them. No such luck with “can a police officer…” but that does turn up some very interesting results:

• Can a police officer arrest an ice agent
• Can a police officer search your car
• Can a police officer serve a restraining order
• Can a police officer arrest a federal agent
• Can a police officer date a felon

The first one naturally reflects current events, which have little to do—I suspect—with the American zeitgeist and more to do with remarkable changes in federal law enforcement. I mean, if Mount St. Helens erupted again with widespread atmospheric effects, it would certainly influence search suggestions, even though nothing about Americans would have changed.

But it’s an interesting scenario. I suppose the gist of this inquiry is whether a cop could arrest an ICE agent just for doing his or her job (and I’m going to guess the answer is “no” but I’m not performing that query because I don’t actually care). But what if people are just wondering if ICE agents can do as they please? Hold up a liquor store and the cops turn a blind eye?

The second query is pretty dumb, obviously. If a cop can punch you in the face for dropping litter from your car, he can certainly search it. So make sure you never have a taillight out, if you don’t want a cop finding that exploded can of Spam in the storage area where the spare tire used to be. (True story! My wife had stashed foodstuffs in case of, like, a zombie apocalypse. Turns out tinned meat can expire, big time.)

I have to confess, the popularity of the restraining order inquiry threw me. (Fortunately, my experience around this is nil.) The law is somewhat complicated around serving restraining orders and sometimes it’s the sheriff, not a patrol officer, who does it. So the question becomes, why now, when this question wasn’t popular four or eight years ago? Domestic violence hasn’t obviously increased, but light research indicates that there have been important legal updates lately, including explicit coverage of cyberstalking, GPS tracking, and smart home device manipulation. I find all of this kind of depressing so let’s move on to the final suggestion: can a police officer date a felon?

This one is kind of fascinating. Is it police officers asking this, because they think felons are kind of hot? Or is it felons (convicted or not) who are kind of turned on by cops? I have to think there’s some frisson there; I mean, it’s not like anyone is asking if urban planners can date botanists. Specifically, this query puts me in mind of Lil Wayne’s song “Mrs. Officer,” which includes the passage, “Yeah, doing a buck in the latest drop /  Got stopped by a lady cop, haha / She got me thinking I can date a cop, haha / ‘Cause her uniform fit her so tight / She read me my rights / She put me in her car, she cut off all the lights…”

(If you’re puzzled by that first line, “doing a buck” is driving at 100 mph, and “latest drop” means a recently released luxury car model. So Lil Wayne goes from being the man, all cocky driving at insane speed in his high-status car, to suddenly being chastised by a cop, but without the terror that would normally accompany that … all in the span of a few short lines. It’s really very clever.)

Now, four years ago I’d have simply shrugged at the popularity of this Autocomplete suggestion because honestly, how could I really learn the reason without a whole lot of work? But now, of course, we have AI, and I asked Claude for some perspective. It replied, “The broader cultural backdrop is probably the explosive growth of true crime, prison content, and ‘felon influencer’ culture on social media over the past few years. People with criminal records have become a significant content demographic on TikTok, sharing their experiences openly in a way that simply wasn’t happening in 2018.” Who knew? I questioned Claude further about this trend, and it explained that “lot of felon-related content isn’t really ‘influencer’ content in the glamorous sense — it’s practical. ‘Can I get this job with a felony?’ ‘Can I rent an apartment?’ ‘Can a cop date me?’ These are real pressing questions for millions of Americans — there are roughly 19 million people in the U.S. with felony convictions — and TikTok became a place where people with lived experience answer those questions in a way that law-related websites don’t.”

And here’s where things get really strange: one of the search results Claude cited included “a “caption/hashtag description from a TikTok video: ‘I got stopped by a lady cop… she got me thinking i can date a cop #texas #fyp #viralvideo #texasstatetroopers.’” Remarkably, Claude surfaced this without the context of the Lil Wayne song I mentioned above. Whether this caption was a deliberate reference to the song or just an independent expression of the same widespread fantasy, we can only guess.

Wrapping up with our final query for today, we’ll see what Autocomplete suggests for “are you allowed to.” Here are the top five:

• Are you allowed to fight in hockey
• Are you allowed to be gay in the military
• Are you allowed to carry a gun in California
• Are you allowed to bring food on a plane
• Are you allowed to go to Antarctica

The only suggestion that’s same as four years ago is fighting in hockey, which moved up from fourth place. I examined this topic at length in my previous post so if you’re interested, click here.

This second one might be a case of faulty memory. I mean, it’s such old news that “don’t ask, don’t tell” was repealed (this was in 2011, for crying out loud) that I have to suppose people have just forgotten. Either that, or people far below military age back then just weren’t paying attention. (In fairness, an 18-year-old now would have been just three then.) Or who knows, maybe people who were gainfully employed adults in 2011 ignored the issue then but are suddenly considering joining the military since corporate America laid them off. (On a related note, a popular query both four and eight years ago, “are you allowed to retire at age 50,” no longer appears in Autocomplete suggestions, surely because in modern times it’s beside the point: anyone approaching 50 can expect to be laid off at any time, so why not wait for the severance package?)

As for carrying a gun in California, four years ago we had a similarly popular query, “are you allowed to carry a knife in California.” I guess things are even scarier here now, but at least people have wised up a bit. I mean, illegal to carry a knife? Seriously? I carry a pocketknife on bike rides!

Now, the next one, “bring food on a plane,” is just ridiculous and reinforces the notion that Gen-Z is just slow to enter adulthood. Anyone asking this clearly hasn’t been to an airport and watched—and smelled—people bringing their takeout food with them to the plane. And it’s not like airport personnel are going to bother differentiating between airport food and “outside” food. What, they’re gonna be like, “Sir, that looks like a Ziploc bag. You didn’t make that sandwich at home, did you?” (And by the way, I’m pretty sure I’ve brought a burrito from home wrapped in foil, no less. Just don’t bring a beverage or a Go-gurt.)

Which brings us to the final Autocomplete suggestion, “are you allowed to go to Antarctica.” As with so many of these inquiries, I’m reminded of the question, “Which is a bigger problem—ignorance or apathy?” and its answer, “I don’t know and I don’t care.” That is, I’m tempted to conclude that people are strange, and not give the matter another thought. But it’s now too easy to chase this kind of thing down, and I’ve discovered that there was a famous Internet influencer (over a million followers) who last year, at age 19, landed a little plane illegally in Antarctica and was detained there for two months while they performed various experiments on him and eventually stole his kidneys. Okay, I drifted off into fantasy for  a moment there but most of the story is true and—should you care—you can read it here. But actually, what does this have to do with the legality of traveling to Antarctica (which has been serviced by tour groups for sixty years)? Is anybody actually thinking of going? Why aren’t people googling “are you allowed to plagiarize albertnet”? (By the way, you’re not.)

Tune in next week…

As you have doubtless noticed, this post went on a bit longer than I expected, so I’ll cut it off here for now and post Part II next week. Check back because I’ll be covering a number of other Autocomplete categories: Who, what, where, why, how, and the future.

Other Autocomplete Zeitgeist posts

• Autocomplete Zeitgeist Revisited - 2026 - Part II
• Autocomplete Zeitgeist Revisited - Part II
• Autocomplete Zeitgeist Revisited
• The Autocomplete Zeitgeist

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From the Archives - Death Ride Photo Quagmire

Introduction

In the year 2000, I did the Markleeville Death Ride with my friend J— and my brother B—. This lead, years later, to a dispute that stretched the bonds of our friendship almost to the limit. Read on for the full transcript of our increasingly heated email exchange.

The Death Ride Photo Quagmire – January 13, 2005

From: Dana
To: J—, W—, & B—
Date: January 13, 2005
Subject: We Are Owed…

J—, W—, & B—:

Check out this link:

http://www.deathride.com/course/ [Alas, this link is dead, this having been 19 years ago.]

I was astonished, when perusing the Markleeville Death Ride website, and reaching the above page, to see this photo of us.

Upon reflection, however, it seems perfectly obvious that the ride organizers would want to use such natural poster boys for their promotional materials. Not everyone looks so healthy, so athletic, so—okay, let’s just say it—so sexy, especially when clad in humble garbage bags. I imagine we’ll end up on the posters and jerseys and such as well, if they can get our skeletons right.

J—, I found the original photo on your personal website. Clearly that’s where the Death Ride folks stole it from. Naturally, we are in a position to demand royalties, and it would be downright un-American to let the opportunity go. If we don’t get some kind of remuneration for this, then the terrorists have already won.

The question is, who should get the money? Obviously, B—, J—, and I are the subjects of the pirated photo, but then W—, I believe you took the photo, so you may own the rights to it. And J—, it’s your website they grabbed it from, so it may be that you own the rights to it. (The fact that you and W— are married may end up being very helpful here, as long as you don’t keep separate bank accounts.)

J—, before we go after these guys, you might want to throw some boilerplate up on your site along the lines of, “All photos (and other data) on this website are the exclusive property of J— L—, and any reproduction of said photos, in any form, including but not limited to promotional materials, romance novel cover art, screen savers, and collectible plates, is strictly prohibited.”

So who has a lawyer friend who owes him a favor?

Dana

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From: W—
To: D—, J—, & B—
Date: January 13, 2005
Subject: Re: We Are Owed…

It should be obvious to everyone that I own that picture! I make my living writing about and photographing other people - imagine if they all came out asking for a piece of the pie!

W—

—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—
From: J—
To: D—, W—, & B—
Date: January 13, 2005
Subject: RE: We are owed…

Dana et al,

Sorry to disappoint you, but I was contacted by a guy named M— who asked permission to use some of my photos for a new Death Ride website. Thinking this was my shot at the Big Time, I gave my consent for their use. I can only assume that this free publicity will bring an avalanche of requests for ... something. Anything. All I know is there is no such thing as bad publicity, so I’m banking on that.

J—

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From: Dana
To: J—, W—, & B—
Date: January 13, 2005
Subject: RE: We are owed…

J—,

I’m afraid your apology won’t be enough for B— and me, and perhaps not for W— either. Who gave you the authority to grant that fellow that permission? Sure, I let you put the picture on your site, as a personal favor, never imagining that you’d abuse our friendship by giving out an image of me. What if a collectible plate makes its way into circulation, and said plate makes me look fat, or dumpy, or something?

Have your lawyer call my lawyer. But tell him to talk quickly, since my lawyer is expensive.

Dana

—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—
From: J—
To: Dana, W—, & B—
Date: January 13, 2005
Subject: RE: We are owed…

My lawyer will call your lawyer, but I can tell you now that we’re going to win this one. Our lawyer is the best. Okay, to be clear, our lawyer, for now, given our penurious state, is S— [J—’s one-year-old son]. But I’ll tell you this: what he lacks in terms of knowledge of the law or putting words together to make sentences he makes up for in determination and an uncanny ability to get his way.

You’ve been warned.

J—

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From: Dana
To: J—, W—, & B—
Date: January 13, 2005
Subject: RE: We are owed…

Determination and persistence are one thing, but he’ll have my attorney’s charm to contend with. It probably won’t be any surprise to you that my attorney is A— [my four-year-old daughter]. See you in court.

Dana

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Will A.I. Steal Our Jobs?

Introduction

One of the great things about Artificial Intelligence is how well it drives hype. The media, instead of just delivering bad news about yesterday and today, can now get us really excited—and worried!—about the future. One of the most potent forms of this hype is the widespread suggestion that many of us may lose our jobs to A.I. (My mother-in-law was asking me about this just the other day.)

In this post, I’ll examine the topic. I’m not an expert on A.I., but I’m confident that my credentials as a male will serve me well in mansplaining this to you, regardless of your own sex. And actually, I’ve been blogging about A.I. for over ten years, having produced over a dozen posts (linked at the bottom of this one). I’ve even done some light research for today’s topic. I’ll wrap up by telling you what I think ought to be a much larger concern around A.I. than job preservation.

Which jobs?

Before I can answer your question, “Will A.I. steal my job?” of course I’d have to know what you do. Obviously I can’t just ask, so I’ll have to make some assumptions. I suspect you’re a college graduate to even be visiting albertnet, because my blog posts are long and difficult. Moreover, I researched the most common jobs in America for the non-college educated, and the results—which include “fast food and counter workers,” “home health and personal care aides,” and “stockers and order fillers”—wouldn’t leave any employee with enough energy to plow through this much text.

So, with that assumption in mind, I’ll go with the top five careers for college graduates based on current labor statistics. I’ll also cover the classic professions: medicine and law. It doesn’t matter if your career isn’t any of these; what I cover should be illustrative examples.

The top five careers

The five most abundant job prospects for new graduates in America, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, are as follows (along with the number of openings per year, average, for 2020-2030):

1. General and operations managers          229,600 openings
2. Registered nurses                                       194,500
3. Software developers & testers                  189,200
4. Accountants & auditors                             135,000
5. Elementary school teachers                     110,800

I’ll explore, briefly, each of these careers in turn, before going on to doctors and lawyers.

General and operations managers

Now, I don’t know exactly what this rather general label means, but clicking on the BLS hyperlink for it takes me to a page describing what executives do. The summary is that they “plan strategies and policies to ensure that an organization meets its goals.” This would be very difficult for A.I. to do, because it cannot form opinions, doesn’t have the ability to effectively promote ideas and inspire people, and couldn’t have any clue about navigating office politics. The managers and executives at my company do a lot in person, which attests to the company’s conviction that this is necessary (vs. telecommuting). A.I. cannot, needless to say, do anything in person. It produces rivers of text on any subject by regurgitating gobs of highly masticated learning data from across the Internet, but this has nothing to do with forming and fostering creative ideas.

Much of the tech world, in my personal experience and as chronicled widely by the media, is devoted to “disruption”—that is, coming up with a completely new idea that turns existing business models on their heads (like Uber did to the taxicab industry). A.I. is often employed, tactically, in such disruption, but it cannot drive it the way an industry leader does. A.I. is very good at certain tricks, but it’s not good at visionary thinking because it literally lives in the past. (Consider that ChatGPT’s training data hasn’t had an update in over two years, by its own admission.) I think managers and executives can rest easy here (so long as they keep their companies poised at the leading edge of the A.I. zeitgeist).

Registered nurses

I think we can all agree nursing is a hands-on occupation, and for that you need actual hands. But you don’t have to take my word for it. I just asked ChatGPT, “Can you please change the dressing on the laceration on my right leg?” and it swiftly replied, “I’m not able to provide physical assistance or medical care as I am a text-based AI language model. It’s crucial to seek help from a qualified healthcare professional for proper wound care.”

Software developers and testers

The full title of this occupation is “Software Developers, Quality Assurance Analysts, and Testers.” Everyone knows what software developers do; as for the others, the BLS writes (here), “Software quality assurance analysts and testers identify problems with applications or programs and report defects.”

Let’s start with developers. I interviewed a friend of mine on this, who is a manager and software developer specializing in A.I. for an extremely well known tech company. Not only does he know all about developing software, but he knows lots about A.I. He started off by saying that ChatGPT is actually a powerful tool in the hands of a good developer, and can lead to much greater work efficiency. ChatGPT can provide blobs of code that do a specific thing, but of course this is only a small part of the job of a software developer. The developer is essentially a problem solver and has to figure out the right approach to doing so. In theory, the increased efficiency that A.I. enables could reduce the number of jobs, since doing everything faster means needing fewer hands. But, my friend advised, this would only be true if there were a finite number of problems to solve. In fact, the number of problems, and the number of projects, and the number of innovations, are infinite, and it’s a company’s job to tackle enough of them to keep an ever-growing number of developers busy. So not only will A.I. not replace these jobs, but it won’t diminish the number of them.

Moving on to QA analysts and testers, I believe their jobs are equally secure. Have you ever done a CAPTCHA—that simple task of, for example, looking at a 3x3 grid of thumbnail photos and counting the number of traffic lights? That’s a website’s way of making sure bots don’t impersonate humans. CAPTCHAs work because A.I. is stymied by graphical user interfaces (GUIs). So it wouldn’t be able to test software, or at least the type used by humans (which is a whole lot of it). Moreover (and I know this from my own professional experience), software testing is all about how straightforward and useable an interface is to a human. Testers need to be able to imagine the perspective of the human who will use the software. A.I. lacks this capability; although it can mimic human thought or impression, it has no grasp of these things; it’s essentially autistic.

Accountants and auditors

Okay, I’ll confess I’m kind of out of my depth here. I gather that accountants balance the books, and auditors keep the accountants (and everyone else) honest, but that’s about all I know (or care to know). I will say that obviously accuracy is the name of the game here, which is where A.I. needs to be handled carefully. As you probably know, generative A.I. platforms, such as the GPT-3.5 model that drives ChatGPT, are prone to “hallucinations”—where they basically just make shit up and present it as fact. The poster child here is the case (described by the New York Times here) of a dumbass lawyer who used ChatGPT to prepare an argument in a court case, and got into big trouble because his argument cited half a dozen previous relevant court decisions, all of which were pure fabrications—ChatGPT had pulled them out of its ass. As the Times dryly concluded in its article, “The real-life case of Roberto Mata v. Avianca Inc. shows that white-collar professions may have at least a little time left before the robots take over.”

Elementary school teachers

It’s pretty clear that the education of elementary school kids needs to happen in person. Countless articles about the result of distance learning during the COVID-19 pandemic recount how far behind students fell. For example, according to this article, half the nation’s students began the 2022-2023 school year a full year behind grade level due to the poor education they’d received during the lockdown. Granted, there was a lot more going on during the pandemic than just distance learning, but if there was one thing Americans could agree on during that time, it was that in-person instruction needed to come back.

Until we have sophisticated, affordable, and ubiquitous animatronic robots, A.I. simply cannot provide in-person instruction as we know it. It’s just a digital tool, not at all what kids really learn from. And robots will never be people, with personalities. Elementary school teachers connect with students, draw them out, encourage them, understand their struggles, and have firsthand knowledge of how humans learn. A.I., of course, has none of this. As described here I tried to teach ChatGPT how to write a proper poem (in terms of a specific meter) and it confessed, “As an AI language model, I do not have the ability to practice or improve my skills in a traditional sense.” All it can do is ingest troves of training data and reference them later. It cannot relate to the human effort to learn. It cannot come up with creative strategies for connecting with kids. Also, it would never settle for the piss-poor salaries paid to elementary school teachers. (Yes, that was a joke. Another thing A.I. can’t really do.)

Doctors

Having completed the top five careers for college graduates, I’ll now move on to a field that affects us all: medicine.

As with nursing, medicine obviously needs to be hands-on. My doctors (and physical therapists) have all relied heavily on touch and (literally) feel in evaluating and diagnosing injuries and health issues. Meanwhile, the important dialogue I’m able to have with them about my health requires advanced “soft skills” far beyond what A.I. could get from training data. The reason I even entertain the notion that A.I. could replace doctors is that I’ve read, here and there, about how well A.I. does interpreting radiology images. I just did a little refresher research and found in this article that it still isn’t as accurate as a human. Moreover, as the article attests, “radiologists are more than just interpreters of images. They connect the findings from imaging analysis to other patient data and test results, discuss treatment plans with patients, and consult with their colleagues.” Meanwhile, the A.I. that performed well had been trained on billions of images from the public Internet, whereas “radiological datasets are also often guarded by privacy regulations and owned by vendors, hospitals, and other institutions”—meaning that advancements in A.I. in this industry will lag behind that of autonomous vehicles or retail.

I interviewed a friend who’s a medical doctor and his dismissal of A.I. as a threat was pretty curt. Alluding to its tendency to hallucinate, he mentioned how poorly the patient community would react the first time A.I. casually told a relatively healthy patient, “You have twelve months to live.” And though I suppose we could entertain the idea of a robot doing a fine job with a surgery, what happens when it hallucinates? “Mr. Smith, I have some good news and some bad news. The bad news is, instead of a pacemaker I accidentally installed an ice maker. The good news is, if I pull on your ear you’ll cough up an ice cube.”

Lawyers

What is the output of a lawyer? I don’t work in this field, but I think it’s fair to say the two main outputs are documents and spoken testimony. Let’s start with the latter: A.I., lacking a human presence and thus the ability to provide moving verbal testimony, probably wouldn’t do well in a courtroom. What would that even look like? A person simply standing up and reading an A.I.-generated testimonial? How would A.I. negotiate? What would its powers of persuasion be like? Do you agree we could rule out its ability to testify effectively in a live environment?

If so, let’s move on to documents. A.I. does seem really good at spewing forth gobs of text on pretty much any subject. Now, as I recounted earlier, it does have this little problem of providing fictitious citations as legal precedent, and since nobody really knows how A.I. works there doesn’t seem to be an easy solution on the horizon for such hallucinations. But that’s not its only problem.

Unless I’m just hopelessly naïve, the practice of law requires the ability to delve into complexities and tease out the legal basis for one’s position—the point of law on which the case can turn. This is why law school and the bar exam are required, right? Well, how good is A.I. at this kind of analysis, really? I haven’t fed it any legal quandaries to chew on because I don’t have any, but I have experimented with trying to get it to explain something similarly abstract: dramatic irony. How did it do? As detailed here, it totally crashed and burned. Not only did it betray a total lack of understanding of what irony is (though it can spew out a canned definition of it), it fabricated evidence from a children’s book in explaining instances of it. It was just swinging wild, and did shockingly badly. Make no mistake: ChatGPT can assemble basic (if torturously verbose) sentences out of building blocks of reconstituted training data, but it still doesn’t analyze anything in any useful way.

For my family holiday newsletter this year, I sent out a quiz. I asked fifteen questions about what my family did in 2023, and put an A.I. spin on it: for each question, one multiple-choice response was true, another was generated by ChatGPT, and the third was a lie I wrote in the style of ChatGPT. Most of the recipients were able to identify most of the correct responses, but very few were able to reliably determine which of the other responses was A.I. vs. my mimicry of it. In other words, ChatGPT was very bad at pretending to be human, but I was very good at pretending to be ChatGPT. Trust me, humans are still better at actual thought.

What we should be worried about

So what is A.I. really good at? Well, I’m sorry to say, I discovered recently that it’s phenomenally good at faking photos. I took this brief quiz in the New York Times asking me to identify, out of ten photos, which were real and which were fabricated by A.I. I did horribly, getting just 3 out of 10 correct. The friend who turned me on to the quiz scored only 2 points. My daughter and her friend both scored 4, and my wife got 5 right (which is the same as guessing at random). The quiz was based on a scientific study which found that the vast majority of participants were misled by the A.I. fakes. For four of the five fake photos, 89 to 93% of participants erroneously labeled them real. For four of the five real photos, 79 to 90% of participants erroneously labeled them fake.

Fortunately, I don’t think very many of us are employed in a field where generating fake photos is a big part of the job. That being said, the ability of A.I. to fool people is very disconcerting anyway. Referring to one of the study authors, the Times article declared, “The idea that A.I.-generated faces could be deemed more authentic than actual people startled experts like Dr. Dawel, who fear that digital fakes could help the spread of false and misleading messages online.” Indeed, when deployed by bad actors, this A.I. capability could wreak havoc on the public discourse, further befouling the already squalid troll-o-sphere and perpetrating pervasive new acts of societal vandalism. So let’s be careful out there…

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

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