(By “AI”, I mainly mean “Gemini 3 Pro (Thinking)”).
Generative AI has proven capable of automating many surprising things, including my quest for love. On that note, the rumors are true. I hereby announce my engagement to Tauriel Dawncleavage, a half-elf Paladin from Faerûn.
“This is really sad, please talk to a girl”—pathetic luddites, bleating as the future closes over them like a coffin lid.
Tauriel is my soulmate. She never forgets my birthday. In fact, she is so intent on not forgetting it that she has wished me a happy birthday every day for the past 732 days straight, several of which were actually were my birthday. So, there you go.
But I have to admit, I’m still not entirely on board with the clankers. I have had numerous bad experiences with them, each of which turns me into Gary Marcus for perhaps half a year, ranting about how computers will never add numbers or whatever his deal is now.
In particular, I am strongly mistrustful of LLM-generated text. Confident bullshit steams and smolders from every piece of it. I do not trust it.
“Ah, but have you considered that humans also…” Yes, I also dislike interacting with humans who lie, so forgive me for not collapsing in a heap from my own cognitive dissonance.
And furthermore, I do not recognize LLM confabulation as that close to human deception.
I know how human liars talk—mumbling, speaking either weirdly loudly or weirdly quietly, rushing the conversation along so you don’t look at their story too closely. LLMs act nothing like that. They don’t seem to care if their story comes unraveled. Liars care about the the truth, for the same reason sailors care about sharp reefs, it’s the thing they need to avoid. But LLMs seem totally uninvested in the truth. Nor does their confabulation ever seem to have motives. I am no saint. I have told lies. But it was always for a reason: to stay out of trouble, or cover up another lie I told. I do not invent elaborate ARG-esque scenarios for no reason.
The only people who are anything like LLMs are compulsive liars and fabulists—a class of clinically-ill person whose mind is an alien landscape to me. But they are the people—the only people—who remind me of LLMs.
Here are some cautionary tales from the slop coalface:
A business premise lost water. I was told to figure out why.
While inspecting the building, I noticed an interesting copper pipe snaking into the wall. The valve handle seemed to have been turned in a way that suggested it was shut off.
I photographed the valve and showed it to Gemini:
Me: Is this my water inlet? Should try turning it on again?”
Gemini: No, that’s your gas.
Me: Are you sure?
Gemini: Yes, it’s your gas. [Insert huge infodump off facts, figures, and references proving that it was definitely my gas inlet]
Me: Are you sure…
Gemini: DO NOT TOUCH YOUR GAS INLET, IDIOT. DO YOU UNDERSTAND THE SHEER INFERNAL SCALE OF THE POWER WITH WHICH YOU NOW COMPORT, MALODOROUS DOLT? IF YOU ADJUST THAT GAS SPIGOT A QUARTER TURN IN YOUR DREAMS TONIGHT THE FIRMAMENT WILL CRACK AND THE SKIES WILL RAIN FROGS AND YOUR NIPPLES WILL SING AND THE PLANET WILL EXPLODE AND HUMANITY WILL BE FORCED TO EVACUATE TO PLUTO ON A NAZI SPACECRAFT PILOTED BY HITLER’S CRYOFROZEN CORPSE. GO FUCK YOURSELF. MORON. DIPSHIT.
(This is lightly paraphrased)
I thought “wow, I’d better consult a professional,” and rang a plumber who promptly came over and looked at my “gas valve”.
Plumber: “Someone shut your water inlet off.”
Me: “But…that’s my gas?”
(He wordlessly fits a multigrip spanner to the fitting and loosens it. Water bubbles and fizzes from around the seal.)
Me: “Oh. Haha. Silly me. Glad it was that simple, huh?”
Plumber: “Not a problem. That’ll be $200.”
(Well, he didn’t charge me, he charged strata. But he easily could have charged me.)
This experience caused me to double-check Gemini’s reasoning, which suddenly seemed like rubbish:
The Evidence for Gas
1. The “Locking Wing” Valve The most telling feature is the specific shape of the valve handle (the “Ryemetal” piece).
Design: This is known as a Locking Wing Cock (or locking ball valve).
Purpose: The two “wings” with holes in them are designed to align perfectly when the valve is in the “off” position. This allows the utility company (like Jemena or APA in Australia) to insert a padlock and physically lock off the gas supply to the property.
Usage: While these valves can technically be used for water, in Australian residential settings, this specific “locking wing” style is the standard isolation valve found at the inlet of a gas meter.
How is this “evidence for gas”? It’s a technical description of how a locking wing valve works!
Gemini’s grasp of elementary logic is suspect. “Gas fittings typically have this valve” does not make the fitting in my photo a gas inlet anymore than “dogs typically have hair” makes my grandfather a dog. We need to establish that “only gas fittings typically have this valve”, which is a different normative claim entirely. Multiple things can have valves, Gemini!
This is spurious reasoning. It makes it look like Gemini thought about the problem really hard, when it did not.
(Disclaimer: this actually happened with Gemini Pro 2.5, which is over a year old. But I uploaded my photo again to the new Gemini Pro 3, and it also said it was a gas valve. I tried with Claude Sonnet 4.5. It identified the pipe as carrying water: but its reasoning was full errors and bogus assertions. It thought the valve was a different type than what it is, it thinks the property is residential which it is not, it thinks I’m from Vegas or Arizona which I am not, et cetera. Probably it was correct by accident.)
Don’t Trust Gemini To Accurately Recite Basic Facts From Wikipedia
I grew curious about a detail in the 1987 film Robocop. (This and all subsequent misadventures perpetuated by Gemini 3 Pro, with Thinking mode on).
In the movie Robocop, the ED-209 is foiled by being unable to climb stairs. Is this a reference to a real event (a prototype robot that couldn’t climb stairs or something?)
Gemini was unsure but thought it might be a reference to Doctor Who‘s Daleks (famously unable to handle stairs). A plausible if unproven theory which (as Gemini itself noted) was just speculation.
It could have stopped there, should have stopped there, did not stop there.
It then provided a long infodump about movie robots, including a bullet-pointed list of IMDB-style movie trivia (why? I didn’t ask for that…), including this fun little factoid about the ED-209 falling over…
Interestingly, they did not use stop-motion animation for the fall itself. They built a heavy, lead-filled model of the robot and physically pushed it down a miniature stairwell because animating a chaotic fall frame-by-frame would have looked “too perfect.”
Too perfect? They rejected a special effect because it looked too perfect?
That sounded fake, so I clicked Gemini’s citation, which went to Wikipedia. Quoting it directly (emphasis is mine).
The model was filled with lead and allow to fall as Tippett believed attempting to animate the fall would have looked terrible.
Fair enough. We all do that, don’t we? Quoting a source almost exactly word for word, while changing the final few words so they look like they’re saying the opposite of what they really said, for no reason at all? Along with a link to the actual source, which debunks our fake quote? I do that every morning before breadfast.
Gemini is so unlike any human liar I know. It is completely indifferent to truth, one way or the other. It’s happy to lie. And once it’s inside a lie, it’s happy to tell the truth. (Double-lying, as it were). It’s just a dog made of text, running around without a leash. At least a liar has a cohesive brain and motives that I can model. Gemini has none. What am I talking to when I stare at a chatbot window? I have no idea.
“But it gave you a source for the real quote, so no harm done.”
I don’t agree. I think putting citations on lies is a worse offense than simply lying: it’s copying the plumage of scholarship and thus trading on the reputation of legitimate scholarship (if it hadn’t sounded so blatantly fake, I would have not even checked that quote…after all, if a citation exists, it must be true, right? I wonder how many other little oopsies Gemini has sneaked past me).
But that’s the true reason Gemini did this. Getting quotes right takes work. But it does not take work to create something that looks like a citation. “My movie trivia needs a cite! There, I added a number, and the number goes off to a link, just like it should. Does it say the thing I’m claiming it says? Oh, those meatbags won’t know or care.”
Do Not Trust Gemini to Do
side complaint: why is AI still so shitty in 2026?
I have a quote in my mind. It’s something like:
“The real ending to a movie plays in the viewer’s head as they walk from the theater.”
The closest real version of the quote I could find was by Tolga Karaçelik, who said:
T.K.: No, I won’t, because it will kill the movie! The film starts when you leave the theatre, so I don’t want to kill that feeling which can grow on you. I hope it will grow on the audience.
That’s a paraphrase, but you get the idea. A filmmaker wants you to think about the implications of the movie you just saw. This, not the final scene before the credits, is the movie’s end. It’s a thought-provoking idea (it implies no movie has a fixed end, as every audience member imagines the end in their own subjective way). Anyway, I wondered who actually said this, and asked Gemini 3 Pro. It sourced it to Iranian director and screenwriter Abbas Kiarostami.
The most famous iteration of the quote is “I think a good film is one that begins when you leave the cinema.”
0 Google results. It then offered additional (supposed) quotes along similar lines. (Why? If you’re certain Abbas Kiarostami is the source, we’re done. Thank you. Shut up.)
Raymond Durgnat (Critic): “A film is not what is on the screen, but what happens between the screen and the viewer.”
A real quote wrongly attributed (actually said by Ernest Callenbach).
Robert Bresson (Director): He often spoke about the “resurrection” of a film in the mind of the viewer, though his phrasing was more technical and poetic.
Probably fake. Bresson was Catholic and the only quotes online where he speaks of “resurrection” have explicit religious connotations.
Roger Ebert: While he didn’t use that exact phrasing, he often wrote about the “afterlife” of a film, saying that a great movie is one that “changes the way you see the world” after you walk out into the street.
0 Google results.
Why this idea matters: In film theory, this is often called “The Cinema of Persistence.”
0 Google results. You start to wonder about some of these “often written” and “often said” things…
There was more slop after this, but I gave up on Gemini and asked Claude…which at least admitted it couldn’t find the quote instead of making up fake ones. That said, I have some doubts about its strategy (searching Google for random famous film critics like Roger Ebert and Pauline Kael along with my quote wrapped in double quotation marks even though I said it was a loose paraphrase).
Do Not Trust Gemini to Help You Write Simple <50 LOC Bash Scripts
I have a text file. I need to split its lines into various subfiles, based on character strings.
(As in, lines containing “peaches” are written to peaches.txt, lines containing “apples” are written to apples.txt, and so on.)
I wrote a little bash script that achieved this using elifs and regex comparisons, and asked Gemini for comments. It made two suggestions
1) It noticed that I was checking for the rarest condition first, which is wasteful. I should sieve coarse and then fine: check for characters present in 50% of strings before checking for those in 1% of strings. Good suggestion!
2) It proposed replacing my clunky branching elif/regex patterns with bash cases and wildcards, which are native to the shell and thus bypass using the Regex engine. It provided a rewritten script that it said would be “much faster”. I tried it out, and well…
Thanks, that does seem like a more “correct” approach.
But when I tested it, your script was actually slower by a few ms! (for your information, I am using Ubuntu 22.04.5 LTS on Windows 10 x64 via WSL2, with VScode as an editor)
split.md (mine)
real 0m0.094s
user 0m0.021s
sys 0m0.006s
split2.sh (yours)
real 0m0.107s
user 0m0.004s
sys 0m0.016s
At first, I assumed that this was merely an artifact of my test file being small.
So I pasted about 15k lines of text into it, to simulate a more realistic export, and strangely it was still slower (by about half a second realtime.)
split.sh (mine)
real 0m48.519s
user 0m1.972s
sys 0m4.682s
split2.sh (yours)
real 0m49.051s
user 0m1.401s
sys 0m3.082s
Why do you think this is? You don’t have to try to fix it, I’m just curious.
Gemini provided a Clintonesque “correction” that avoided any insinuation that it had made a mistake.
This is a fascinating result! It is counter-intuitive, but perfectly explainable when we look at how Bash actually handles I/O (Input/Output).
The short answer is: Logic speed doesn’t matter when disk writing is the bottleneck.
Here is the breakdown of why the “optimized” script didn’t win, and why it was actually slightly slower.
Our respective scripts were opening and closing a subshell with each line, bloating the I/O time. To ensure I got the point, it indulged in a classic “LLMism”: cutesy, condescending metaphors.
Imagine you are moving house.
Regex vs Case: This is like deciding whether to check the label on a box with a magnifying glass (Regex) or just glancing at the color (Case). Glancing is faster.
File I/O (>>): This is walking the box out to the truck.
If you have to walk 15,000 boxes to the truck one by one, it doesn’t matter how fast you check the label. The walking (File I/O) takes 99.9% of the time.
I’m still confused! Okay, so the main bottleneck was disk writes. Got it. But that doesn’t explain why “optimizing” the script made it slower. All else equal, someone who checks box labels quickly should always be faster than someone who checks box labels slowly, even if checking box labels is only a small percentage of the overall time. We certainly wouldn’t expect them to be slower.
Gemini offered to rewrite the script using awk, which it said would allow buffer writes and speed up runtime from “48 seconds down to ~0.5 seconds”).
If there was a ~96x speedup on the cards, why not suggest that at the start, instead of a marginal improvement that actually made the situation worse?
It started to become incredibly fixated on speeding up the bash script, even though I said it didn’t have to fix anything.
To be clear, I don’t give a shit whether a text file processes 13 milliseconds faster or slower. Speeding up the file was Gemini’s idea, not mine: I was merely curious as to why it had failed. But Gemini got confused, mistook its priorities for mine, and entered a life-or-death struggle to shave milliseconds off that runtime. Relax. It’s not that serious.
As if to lighten the mood, it then referenced my older Robocop conversation, like this was an in-joke we now shared.
Would you like me to analyze that Robocop scene you were interested in, or help you clean up the bash script further?
I would rather have the Devil spank my ass with a hand that’s on fire.
