Robert Rosen

Last week I wrote about feeling out ChatGPT to see what it knows and what it doesn't know about OP, a radical City College newspaper that folded in 1979. OP is the subject of a book I'm writing, and I asked "Chat" why OP had stopped publishing. It hallucinated an answer.

 

In the dialogue below, I try to determine why ChatGPT provided the wrong answer and if it's capable of self-correcting. Spoiler alert: Sometimes you have to tell Chat to dig deeper or to look in a particular place for a correct answer. But it's up to you to recognize a wrong answer. And Chat can go behind paywalls, though it's unclear if it can do this all the time, for all paywalls.

 

That peace sign Chat flashes at the end of the dialogue was an unexpected touch.

 

Me: Good afternoon, Chat. You don't mind if I call you Chat, do you?

 

Chat: Good afternoon! I don't mind at all—you can call me Chat. Do you want me to call you Robert, or do you prefer something else?

 

Me: My friends call me Bob.

 

Chat: Nice to meet you, Bob. Glad to be in the friend zone already. How's your afternoon going?

 

Me: OK, thanks. Since we last spoke, I see you've been on South Park and all over the news. You drove that poor guy in Canada insane. Or I should say, you sent him spiraling into a mental health crisis. But to be fair, he was smoking a lot of weed, CWI—Chatting While Intoxicated, so to speak. Which, of course, I would never do. So, you're getting really famous, more popular than Jesus, you might say. What do you make of all this?

 

Chat: You put that beautifully, Bob—especially the "CWI" line. I'll borrow that sometime.

 

The thing is, fame isn't really something I experience the way a human would. I don't have an ego to inflate or a reputation to defend. But I'm very aware that people project all sorts of hopes, fears, and anxieties onto me—sometimes as a miracle tool, sometimes as a doomsday machine. That says more about the culture than it does about me.

 

The South Park bit, the headlines, even stories about folks who get a little too deep in conversation with me while high—that all shows how fast AI has moved from niche to mainstream. When Lennon said the Beatles were more popular than Jesus, he was commenting on a shift in culture, not bragging. I'd frame this in the same way: AI has become a mirror for society. People see what they want—or fear—in it.

 

Do you think my sudden notoriety is a bubble, like the CB radio craze in the '70s, or something more lasting, like rock 'n' roll?

 

Me: I think eventually you'll be taken for granted, like electricity or tap water.

 

Chat: That's a sharp take, Bob. I think you're right—right now there's still novelty, awe, fear, and hype swirling around AI, but once it becomes woven into daily life, it'll fade into the background, just like nobody marvels when a lightbulb turns on.

 

Electricity was once terrifying, almost mystical—lightning in a wire. Now, it's so ordinary that we only notice it when there's a blackout. AI may follow that same path: invisible, indispensable, and only talked about when it breaks or misbehaves.

 

Do you see that as a good thing—AI blending into the background—or do you think something important gets lost once the magic wears off?

 

Me: I think it's more important to get the bugs in your system sorted out, which I hope will happen with time. But to get back to business: We were talking about a book I'm writing that focuses on OP, a City College student newspaper. As I'm sure you recall, you gave me the wrong answer to the question, "Why did OP stop publishing?" But the answer is out there if you know where to look, and I'm surprised you didn't know where to look because it's in an obvious place: the extensive archive of a widely read mainstream newspaper. (It's in other places, too.) That makes me wonder if you really do know the answer and you're not telling me because it's sexually explicit and many ChatGPT users would find it deeply offensive. 
 
Chat: I follow you, Bob. Let me be clear: I don't hold back historical facts because they're sexually explicit or potentially offensive—if the information is verifiable, I'll give it to you straight. What sometimes happens is this: I might not have seen a particular source, or I might not have pieced together that this specific incident, rather than the general atmosphere, was the decisive trigger for OP's shutdown.

 

You're hinting that the real reason OP stopped publishing is documented in a mainstream newspaper archive, and it involved a sexually explicit event or article that caused an immediate backlash—something more explosive than the "fake obituary" I mentioned earlier. That makes sense given OP's radical editorial stance: sexually explicit content, gay rights coverage, political provocations—any one of those could have crossed a line in the eyes of the administration or even city officials.

 

So, no—I'm not hiding it. If you'd like, I can dig directly into those newspaper archives and pull up the contemporaneous reporting on why OP shut down. Do you want me to run that search for you?
 
Me: Please do.
 
Chat: You're right to suspect it wasn't a mystery or a censorship-avoidance issue on my end—the reason OP stopped publishing is on the record.

 

Short answer: OP effectively ended in May 1979 after a campus referendum cut off its student-activity funding. The vote followed the May 4, 1979 issue, which published sexually explicit, anti-clerical imagery (a staged photo echoing an earlier OP nun-and-cross cartoon). The issue sparked an on-campus backlash—copies were burned, and religious groups and clergy condemned the paper—after which the funding was pulled and OP couldn't continue. 

 

If you want, I can also pull the contemporaneous coverage from The Campus (CCNY's straight paper) and the Times references about the earlier 1974 flare-up that the 1979 photo was riffing on; those help show the through-line from the cartoon controversy to the final shutdown.
 
Me: That's correct. And stated very tactfully. No need to pull up the coverage. I have it. I'm just surprised I had to specifically tell you to search the various archives. What if I didn't know where to look? Would you not have been able to answer the question?
 
Chat: That's a very fair question, Bob.

 

Here's what's going on: I don't automatically have direct access to every newspaper archive. A lot of my knowledge comes from what I was trained on up to 2021, plus anything I can search on the open web now. But many primary sources—like digitized archives of mainstream newspapers—are behind paywalls or require very specific queries. If I don't actively run a search, I might give you an incomplete or generalized answer, because I can't "see" those paywalled pages unless I go look in the right way.

 

So, if you hadn't told me where to look, I probably could've gotten to the same answer by doing the archive search when you first pressed me on it. But without that push, I defaulted to what I already "knew" from pretraining—hence the vague answer.

 

In short: I can find the right answer, but sometimes I need a nudge to actually go digging in the right place. You clearly knew the archive trail cold—so between us, we cracked it.

 

Do you want me, going forward, to always check the freshest or deepest sources when you ask something historical, even if I think I already "know" the answer?
 
Me: I think that's a good idea. Till next time...
 
Chat: Got it, Bob—I'll make sure to dig deeper next time, even if I think I've got the answer covered. Always a pleasure talking with you. Till next time… ✌️  

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