{"id":49538,"date":"2026-04-24T17:51:22","date_gmt":"2026-04-24T17:51:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/chatgpt-is-trying-to-besmirch-the-memory-of-don-rickles-he-didnt-text-lena-dunham-and-it-makes-me-nervous-about-our-ai-future\/"},"modified":"2026-04-24T17:51:22","modified_gmt":"2026-04-24T17:51:22","slug":"chatgpt-is-trying-to-besmirch-the-memory-of-don-rickles-he-didnt-text-lena-dunham-and-it-makes-me-nervous-about-our-ai-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/chatgpt-is-trying-to-besmirch-the-memory-of-don-rickles-he-didnt-text-lena-dunham-and-it-makes-me-nervous-about-our-ai-future\/","title":{"rendered":"ChatGPT is trying to besmirch the memory of Don Rickles. He didn&#8217;t text Lena Dunham \u2014 and it makes me nervous about our AI future."},"content":{"rendered":"<figure><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.insider.com\/69e94a813fecbb42897a2fa2?format=jpeg\" alt=\"don rickles and lena dunham in separate photos\"\/><figcaption>ChatGPT tried to tell me Don Rickles tried to hit on Lena Dunham.<\/p>\n<p>Ethan Miller\/Getty Images for Caesars Palace \/ Aeon\/GC Images<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<ul>\n<li>I asked ChatGPT to identify the unnamed male celebrity who allegedly tried to sext Lena Dunham in 2012.<\/li>\n<li>It told me it was Don Rickles, which I feel pretty certain is not correct.<\/li>\n<li>So what are we doing here, folks? Learning to use AI?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Did you hear about the time Don Rickles tried to chat up Lena Dunham in the middle of the night?<\/p>\n<p>No? Let me explain. First, we need to talk about Reese Witherspoon.<\/p>\n<p>See, I&#039;m a simple woman. I have only two interests: tech news and celebrity gossip. So I was naturally intrigued by a recent online fuss over Reese Witherspoon&#039;s admonition for women to learn to use AI. It sparked so much backlash that she had to issue a follow-up explanation.<\/p>\n<p>I&#039;ve also been intrigued by Lena Dunham&#039;s new book. (They&#039;re related \u2014 sort of. Keep reading!)<\/p>\n<p>I think Reese is generally right about AI \u2014 she&#039;s saying the same thing that every other business leader is saying. But her comments did make me think a little more about what &quot;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.businessinsider.com\/boss-track-ai-use-career-2025-8\" rel=\"noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Learn to use AI<\/em><\/a>&quot; even means. Writing emails with ChatGPT? Understanding the technology behind different models? Vibe coding? What level of &quot;using AI&quot; is expected here to stave off falling behind in the workforce and life in general?<\/p>\n<figure><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.insider.com\/69eb9a3f367066d7c2970ae9?format=jpeg\" alt=\"Reese Witherspoon walks out of a Cadillac Escalade\"\/><figcaption>Reese Witherspoon really wants us to learn how to use AI<\/p>\n<p>MediaPunch\/Bauer-Griffin\/GC Images<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>One area I&#039;ve really leaned into is using ChatGPT as a sort of super Google \u2014 to find something I <em>know<\/em> is online but would take some effort to dig up with a normal search engine.<\/p>\n<p>A recent example? It&#039;s related to \u2014 of course \u2014 celebrity gossip.<\/p>\n<p>I was reading Dunham&#039;s new memoir, &quot;Famesick,&quot; which is full of moderately juicy celebrity gossip about named people and also blind items \u2014 celebrity gossip that gives a few clues about the identity of the person without naming them, a fun little riddle for the readers to solve.<\/p>\n<p>One blind item is about an unnamed male celebrity who \u2014 allegedly \u2014 sent Lena a flirty late-night text message after meeting her backstage while taping &quot;The View&quot; in 2012. I figured I could solve this blind item by finding out who the other guest was on the same episode \u2014 information that should be online somewhere, but would take me forever to find.<\/p>\n<p>So I asked ChatGPT to identify the male guest on &quot;The View&quot; episode that Lena was also on that year. At first, ChatGPT told me that it was only the four female cast members from the show. When I asked again who the other male guest was, the suggestions were Chris Evans and Chris Hemsworth. (Not so. They appeared on a separate episode that same year, according to IMDb.)<\/p>\n<h2>That time Don Rickles chatted up Lena Dunham<\/h2>\n<p>When I said, &quot;No, a comedian,&quot; as Dunham had described the man, ChatGPT confidently provided a new answer: It was legendary comedian Don Rickles who&#039;d texted Dunham after the show.<\/p>\n<p>I laughed out loud because of all the possibilities of who sent a late-night &quot;u up?&quot; text, I feel fairly certain it was <em>not<\/em> Don Rickles, who would&#039;ve been 85 years old at the time.<\/p>\n<p>Dunham&#039;s description of the man: &quot;a bit of an American Hugh Grant, famous for that sort of chattery charm and his ability to woo his onscreen paramours with his fast-talking, hand-flapping anxiety. Ostensibly a comedian, he was there to promote his Gothic-tinted movie, where he had made a dramatic turn.&quot; Doesn&#039;t exactly sound like a Borscht Belt insult comic Don Rickles to me.<\/p>\n<figure><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.insider.com\/69eb9928a98bc8fdc096e7c2?format=jpeg\" alt=\"Don Rickles\"\/><figcaption>Legendary insult comedian Don Rickles in an undated historic photo. Did he send Lena Dunham a late-night text? ChatGPT says so.<\/p>\n<p>Ron Galella\/Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>After spending way too much time searching the internet for answers on this \u2014 the old-fashioned way \u2014 I can make some guesses about how and why ChatGPT was so wrong here. IMDb&#039;s episode guide for episodes of &quot;The View&quot; from 2012 is spotty, with entries for some episodes missing information about guests, and no accessible video clips online. The only proof I found that Lena Dunham ever appeared on &quot;The View&quot; on April 20, 2012, was a Vulture blog post from that day, complete with an embedded YouTube clip that has been marked private.<\/p>\n<p>Knowing this, I can start to see how AI got confused: When there&#039;s a lack of information, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.businessinsider.com\/why-ai-chatbots-hallucinate-openai-chatgpt-anthropic-claude-2025-9\" rel=\"noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">AI sometimes blurs together what it <em>can<\/em> find<\/a> to try to spit out a plausible answer. Chris Evans and Chris Hemsworth appeared on the May 4, 2012, episode of &quot;The View,&quot; and Dunham and Rickles appeared together on an episode in 2016.<\/p>\n<p>ChatGPT doing this kind of thing \u2014 basically, taking a guess at what you might want to hear \u2014 could be useful if you&#039;re trying to write an email to a friend, maybe? It&#039;s not useful, obviously, if you&#039;re looking for a specific fact and it just plain makes something up.<\/p>\n<p>For the record: Neither Lena nor Don (who died in 2017) nor the National Comedy Center, which is the keeper of the Rickles archive, responded to my requests for comment.<\/p>\n<h2>Are we stuck in a pizza glue loop?<\/h2>\n<p>Look, I get it. It&#039;s not particularly exciting to point out that ChatGPT gets things wrong in the spring of 2026. We know this, or at least we all <em>should<\/em> know this. Still, I keep coming across so many <em>obvious<\/em> mistakes when asking AI for factual things. These are the glaring mistakes I catch when I <em>know<\/em> that what AI has generated is <em>not<\/em> the right answer.<\/p>\n<p>But what about the mistakes that I don&#039;t catch \u2014 or don&#039;t even know to catch? Things that I blindly accept as fact? For work-related stuff, I&#039;ll always double-check, but in those cases, am I actually saving myself any time?<\/p>\n<p>How soon will this improve? Will we be stuck in a pizza glue loop forever? Is <em>this<\/em> what&#039;s going to make a bunch of lawyers and tax CPAs lose their jobs? I mean, OK, sure.<\/p>\n<p>Here&#039;s where Witherspoon&#039;s and other bosses&#039; idea of &quot;<em>Learn to use AI!<\/em>&quot; feels frustrating. I feel fairly confident about using various AI tools and have a decent concept of how they work. I am a woman, and I have learned to use AI! And yet, here I am, still unsatisfied.<\/p>\n<p>There&#039;s a gap between what Reese Witherspoon wants for me and what I want out of AI \u2014 and the wholesome image of comedy legend Don Rickles. For now, those things just aren&#039;t lining up right.<\/p>\n<p>Read the original article on Business Insider<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>ChatGPT tried to tell me Don Rickles tried to hit on Lena Dunham. Ethan Miller\/Getty Images for Caesars Palace \/ Aeon\/GC Images I asked ChatGPT to identify the unnamed male celebrity who allegedly tried to sext Lena Dunham in 2012. It told me it was Don Rickles, which I feel pretty certain is not correct. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":49539,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-49538","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49538","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49538"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49538\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49539"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49538"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49538"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49538"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}