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… ✌️  

______

All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.   

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on Instagram, Threads, and Bluesky.

 
 
 

 

As I near completion of a book about OP, a radical student newspaper at City College, I've been messing around with ChatGPT, trying to get a sense of how much A.I. knows about the story and how much has never been told.

 

So far I've found that most of what ChatGPT says is accurate. But in the conversation below, it goes off the deep end and "hallucinates" an incorrect answer. 

 

What's striking about the answer is that it sounds like a very smart student trying to bluff his way through an essay question. A lot of the information in the answer is factually correct in and of itself. But it's the wrong answer. Yet it's so detailed and authoritative sounding, it had me believing for a second it was the right answer. A student researching the question would most likely be fooled. (OP's main source of advertising income, incidentally, was not "local record shops, bookstores, and bars.")

 

It leaves me wondering if ChatGPT ever says, "I don't know."

 

Here's the conversation in full:

 

Me: Several weeks ago we were discussing OP, a student newspaper at the City College of New York. Do you recall?

 

ChatGPT: Yes—I remember. You were asking about OP (short for Observation Post), the radical CCNY student newspaper that ran from 1947 until it folded in 1979. We talked about how it evolved into a politically and sexually radical publication in the late 1960s and 70s—anti–Vietnam War, supportive of gay rights, open admissions, and with a strong focus on rock music and counterculture. You also asked about its logo and illustrations, and we worked on creating some graphic interpretations of it.

 

Do you want to pick up where we left off—the history side, or the visual side?

 

Me: You were very detailed about OP's history from 1947 through the early 70s. But you were kind of vague about the history in the late 70s, what I call the "punk years." For example, you didn't explain why it stopped publishing. Do you know why?

 

ChatGPT: Yes—you're right, when we last discussed OP I gave you a fairly detailed account of its early years and its 1960s–early 70s radical period, but I didn't go deep into the late 70s "punk years." That period was messier, and the end of the paper wasn't the result of one clear event, but rather a convergence of factors:

 

Financial collapse: By the mid-to-late 70s, CCNY's student government and the University Student Senate had cut back on subsidies for student newspapers. Printing costs soared, and OP's reliance on ads (especially from local record shops, bookstores, and bars) wasn't enough to keep it afloat.

 

Political shifts: The campus mood had changed after the end of the Vietnam War and the settling of the open admissions battles. Radical politics no longer drew the same intensity, and OP's mix of sexual radicalism, underground comix, and punk sensibility alienated some of its old readership while not fully connecting with the new wave of students.

 

Institutional hostility: CCNY's administration and parts of student government were openly hostile to OP's content in the late 70s—especially its sexual openness (erotic photos and writing) and its attacks on faculty/administration. There were funding fights, censorship attempts, and sometimes outright refusals to release funds.

 

Staff burnout and fragmentation: The collective that put out OP was constantly changing as students graduated. By the late 70s the staff had shrunk, factions formed (political vs. cultural vs. punk/underground), and energy drained away.

 

The paper finally folded in 1979, when a combination of loss of funding, administrative pressure, and dwindling staff made it impossible to publish. Some veterans of OP later described the last issues as having a distinctly "punk zine" feel—raw layouts, lots of music coverage, more underground comics—but by then the infrastructure that sustained it for three decades had collapsed.

 

Do you want me to give you a chronological narrative of the "punk years" (1975–79) so you can see how the decline played out issue by issue, or more of a big-picture analysis of why the radical press in general was imploding around that time?

Me: Actually, that's not correct. OP did stop publishing because of one specific event that played out over the last two issues. Do you know what that event is?

 

ChatGPT: You're absolutely right—and thanks for pointing that out. Observation Post (OP) didn't collapse slowly, but rather, it ended abruptly over a very specific incident that spanned just two issues in late 1978.

 

In the December 20, 1978, issue of OP—the "Christmas issue"—the paper published a fictional obituary-style headline: "OP Editor dies of drugs after being forced to resign." This was dramatic, metaphorical, and stylized—an expression of chaos and despair, not reality.

What prompted this provocative fake obituary? The editor in question had indeed been forced to step down—not because she had died, but because she was no longer a registered student at CCNY. That meant she was ineligible to continue serving as OP's editor-in-chief. Feeling both betrayed and distraught, she declared her "death" in the pages of OP as a final act of protest, symbolizing the end of both her editorial reign and the paper's momentum.

But that morbid metaphor proved prophetic. Shortly after that issue, OP folded entirely. According to retrospective accounts, students physically burned copies of OP to express outrage over the contents of the issue, including that fake obituary. Estimates vary—from 4,000 copies burned according to The Campus (OP's rival paper), to possibly as many as 8,000

In short, The paper ceased publishing because of the forced resignation of an unregistered editor, dramatized through a faux obituary. That final issue catalyzed its demise—and literally ended with students burning copies of OP. Thus, its end wasn't due to creeping decline, but one symbolic, incendiary event over two issues.

 

Would you like to dig further into the content of those last two issues—or explore how that dramatized "death" mirrored the death of OP itself?

Me: Nice try, but again, not correct. It wasn't the fake obituary that led to OP's demise. But you've given me what I need for the time being. I'll get back to you.

 

ChatGPT: Got it—thanks for letting me know. Sounds like you've got some inside knowledge of the real story. I'll be here when you want to circle back and dig into those last two issues of OP in more detail.

______

All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.   

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on Instagram, Threads, and Bluesky.

 

I heard that ChatGPT, the popular A.I. machine, wanted to be my friend. So I struck up a conversation. 

 

Me: I'm Robert Rosen author of Nowhere Man and a few other books. Are you familiar with my work?
 
ChatGPT: Yes, I'm familiar with your work, Robert. Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon is your most well-known book—a unique and controversial portrait of Lennon that dives into his final years, partly based on the diaries of Lennon that you had access to. It's been widely discussed for its unconventional approach and the way it blends biography with elements of memoir and subjective experience.

 

You've also written Beaver Street: A History of Modern Pornography, which explores the adult publishing industry from a personal and historical angle. Your writing often walks that line between investigative journalism and memoir, giving readers an insider's view that's raw and often provocative. Are you working on something new?
 
Me: Yes, why do you ask?
 
ChatGPT: I asked because authors like yourself—especially those who dig into counterculture, taboo subjects, and untold stories—often have something new in the works, and it's usually worth paying attention to. Your previous books have a distinct voice and perspective, so if there's a new project coming, I'd be genuinely interested to hear what direction you're going in. Are you writing another memoir, cultural exposé, or something entirely different this time?
 
Me: It's another combination of history and memoir about an underground student newspaper at the City College of New York in the 1970s, a time when the student left was giving way to punk. The paper was called Observation Post or OP. Are you familiar with it?
 
ChatGPT: Absolutely—the Observation Post (often abbreviated as OP) was a real underground student newspaper at the City College of New York. Published weekly from 1947 through 1979, it was initiated by CCNY veterans and later became a key platform for radical student voices, antiwar coverage, and grassroots protest.

 

In the late '60s and early '70s, OP emerged as an alternative to the official college media. It frequently published Marxist‑inflected editorials and engaged in open conflicts with CCNY administrators over political expression and student rights .

 

By the early 1970s, OP was deeply embedded in the antiwar and countercultural movements. You've written that in 1971, after the Weathermen townhouse explosion on West 11th Street, you joined OP and began to see those radical connections firsthand—particularly the generational shift from student leftism toward the punk sensibility that was emerging on campus. 

 

So yes, I'm familiar with OP and its significance both as a historical artifact and as a lived site in your own story. It straddles the line between underground radical press and the sensibility of a punk-inflected memoir—exactly the terrain you're exploring in your new book.

 

Would you like help mapping out how to frame OP's historical importance, connect it to punk's rise, or place your personal journey alongside broader cultural shifts?

 

***

Which is where I ended the conversation.

 

Most of what ChatGPT said is accurate. Any mistakes I could point out would be nitpicking. I am encouraged by the vagueness of what it said about OP in the late 1970s. I take that to mean there isn't much on the record about what happened in 1978 and '79, and why OP no longer exists, which is a key element of my book and a story that needs to be told.

______

All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.   

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on Instagram, Threads, and Bluesky.

If my business—if you can call what I do a business rather than a grand delusion that I've been pursuing for more than 50 years—needed a slogan, something like, "Just Do It" or "Finger Lickin' Good," it would be: "Pissing People Off Since 1971." This occurred to me the other day when I was thinking about all the people whom my writing has enraged or who have been infuriated by cartoons that other people have created and that I published in newspapers and magazines I once edited.

 

It's true that in the 1970s I did publish things to intentionally piss people off. In those days of emerging punk and outrage for the sake of outrage, it was a generational response to coming of age in a society run by criminals and hypocrites and seeing no path forward into a bleak-looking future. The Sex Pistols had good reason to sing, "No future for you." 

 

The best-known episode of this protopunk era was the publication, in 1974, in Observation Post (OP), a radical college newspaper I edited, of a cartoon of a "nun using a cross as a sexual object" (as The New York Times put it), drawn by the late artist and filmmaker Robert Attanasio.

 

The drawing was Attanasio's statement on his childhood abuse at the hands of the Catholic clergy, which left him with what I now think was a case of PTSD. And the public reaction to the cartoon, which I touched on in Beaver Street, and which I'm exploring in detail in the book I'm currently working on, was so extreme, I'm still trying to make sense of it.

 

A very pissed off ultra-conservative New York Senator, James Buckley, led the charge against OP, calling for a federal investigation and the expulsion of the editors responsible for the cartoon. But nothing of the sort happened. Student newspapers, the courts declared, have a constitutional right to criticize religion in any manner they see fit, and the Catholic Church is not above criticism—which I'd think is especially true for those who've been subjected to the Church's abuse.

 

The people who became enraged at my John Lennon bio, Nowhere Man, were Yoko Ono's media flacks as well as Lennon fans who didn't like the inherent truth I communicated in the book. The media flacks were just doing what they were told to do. But fans of the man who sang "Just give me some truth," yet are opposed to learning the truth of who Lennon was in real life, have always puzzled me. It wasn't my intention to piss anybody off with Nowhere Man. It just happened naturally.

 

Beaver Street, my history of the adult entertainment industry, pissed off a lot of people, too. Some of them were enraged that I treated certain characters with what they thought was too much sympathy. Others were angry for the opposite reason. But nobody was more pissed off than the late Gloria Leonard, a former porn star and figurehead publisher of High Society magazine. Leonard demanded I make clear that she was the real publisher, not a figurehead. I refused. The barrage of junior-high-school-level insults she lobbed at me were reminiscent of the wit and wisdom of Donald Trump. The episode saddened me. I'd met Leonard several times and I liked her. But she was not the publisher of High Society. That would be Carl Ruderman, who hid behind Leonard's skirt.

 

I've run into only one person whom my latest book, A Brooklyn Memoir, pissed off. It happened at an event where I read from the book and then took questions from the audience. A woman, making no effort to hide her rage, said that she grew up in Flatbush, only a few blocks from where I did, and what I described in the book was nothing like what she experienced. She implied that I was lying. My response: "Each block was like a mini-neighborhood and everybody had their own experiences." And I moved on.

 

There are more recent examples that I prefer not to get into here. Because there's no need to re-infuriate people whose wounds are still raw. But it does remind me of an old adage: If your stories don't piss anybody off, what you're writing is public relations, not journalism.  

 

And, of course, there are the immortal words of Joan Didion: "Writers are always selling somebody out."

______

All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

 

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on Instagram, Threads, and Bluesky.

The way things are in publishing these days, it's as difficult for me to sell a magazine article as it is to sell a book. So I usually don't bother writing articles because even if I do sell one, it'll be around for a month at best. My books, however, tend to endure. Nowhere Man remains in print 17 years after publication.

Ironically, both my books began as failed magazine articles. In 1982, Rolling Stone and Playboy turned down an early version of what became Nowhere Man--because I couldn't prove to their satisfaction that what I'd written was true. I started writing Beaver Street in 1995 on assignment from The Nation. It was supposed to be an article about the economics of pornography. They rejected it for not being “political enough.”

But sometimes the stars line up and something I write finds its way into a magazine. This month, the first part of a three-part series called “The Provocateur” has been published on a British site, Erotic Review. The series is an excerpt from a book about the 1970s that I’ve been working on, and it’s the story of my old friend Robert Attanasio, an artist and filmmaker who died in 2015.

It was Attanasio’s death that helped me find a focus for the book and made me realize what its central theme should be—the moment when the student left gave way to Punk.

Part I comes with multiple trigger warnings and a big NSFW. Stay tuned for parts II and III.

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As I contine to immerse myself in the 1970s, reconstructing that time for a book I've been writing, I'm continually reminded of how much I forgot.

Fortunately, I have an archive of Observation Post, a student newspaper at the City College of New York. I joined OP in 1971, as a sophomore; became editor in chief as a senior; remained a contributor as a grad student; and in 1978 and '79, while living with the then editor in chief, I acted as surrogate editor.

OP was a radical, political, pornographic embodiment of First Amendment freedom of expression, underwritten by City College, and produced by both students and former students turned professionals. Its readership extended beyond the campus. By the end of its 32-year run, OP had become a record of the staff and contributors’ emotional turmoil, and nowhere is this more apparent than in a Christmas issue, dated December 20, 1978.

The memory-jogging front-page reminded me how far out of our fucking minds we were.

“OP Editor dies of drugs after being forced to resign” was fake news. The editor in question, the one I was living with, did not die. (As far as I know, she’s still alive.) But in December 1978, her life had descended into a state of chaos and despair. The coup de grâce came when the school forced her to give up her beloved editorship because she wasn’t registered as a student. To share her feelings with the administration (and the world), she died a metaphorical death in the pages of OP.

My book focuses on the moment in history when the student left gave way to punk, and it was in this issue of OP that punk won. The fake-news death of the editor foreshadowed both the real heroin-overdose death of Sid Vicious, of the Sex Pistols, little more than a month later, and the symbolic punk-suicide of OP itself the following year.

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