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Notes -
Back in 2010 I toyed with the idea of calling into sports talk shows and fuck with them by asking if the Pittsburgh Penguins should fire Dan Bylsma and convince Jaromir Jagr to retire so that he could take over as head coach. Bylsma was coming off a Stanley Cup championship that he had guided the team to after being hired the previous February to replace Michel Therrien, but the Pens were going through a bit of a midwinter slump in January (though not nearly as bad as the one that had prompted Therrien's firing).
So the idea was ridiculous—that they'd fire a championship coach who hadn't even been with the team a full season, and replace him with a guy who wasn't even retired (he was 37 years old and playing in Russia at the time but he'd return to the NHL the following season and stayed until he was nearly 50) and had never expressed any interest in coaching. It was based entirely on a dream I had where I was at a game and Jagr was standing behind the bench in a suit, and it was the height of hilarity when friends of mine were under the influence of certain intoxicants.
So I asked ChatGTP "What was the source of the early 2010 rumor that the Penguins were considering firing Dan Bylsma and replacing him with Jaromir Jagr?" It came up with a whole story about how the rumor was based on a mistranslation of an interview he gave to Czech media where he said that he'd like to coach some day after he retired and the Penguins were one of the teams he was interested in, and the whole thing got blown out of proportion by the Pittsburgh media. Except that never happened, though I give it credit for making the whole thing sound reasonable. I've come to the conclusion that if you word your prompts in such a way that certain facts are presumed to be true, the AI will simply treat them as true, though not all of the time. For instance, it was savvy enough to contradict my claim that George W. Bush was considering switching parties and seeking the Democratic nomination in 2004.
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