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A Great Story Capturing the Essence of Being Online in 2026
I made a note of it, but Bryan Cantrill wrote a post about the ex-Anthropic employee who pegged the probability of AI killing humanity in the next decade at >10%.
The article is a good one and you should read it, but what I want to capture here is a side story from Cantrill on the _Oxide and Friends_ podcast where he talks about how proud he was of this phrase from his post: **“These ghoulish claims strike brazenly at the hearth…”**.
He notes that someone online commented on that phrase, saying it sounded like a mix of classic literature and a line from _The Simpsons_.
Amused, Cantrill says he came up with the line all by himself, so he knew it wasn’t a classic literature reference nor a line from _The Simpsons_.
But just to be sure, he Google’d it: “These ghoulish claims strike brazenly at the hearth” with “The Simpsons” tagged on to the end.
To his surprise, Google’s AI told him that the line was, in fact, a line from _The Simpsons_. Here’s Google’s response (as reported by Cantrill):
> During the Springfield mayoral debate on Channel 6, Sideshow Bob dramatically delivers the line “these ghoulish claims strike brazenly at the hearth of Springfield” while turning the debate against Mayor Joe Quimby. Instead of denying his criminal history, Bob exploits Quimby’s record and boldly tells the audience they secretly long for a cold-hearted Republican to rule them like a king.
(Here’s my homemade graphic for illustration purposes.)
Cantrill was astonished. Not knowing the episode enough by heart to discern whether this claim was true, he had a little bit of a panic attack:
> If I am having what I feel to be original thoughts that are, in fact, just _Simpsons_ lines regurgitating from 30 years ago, that’s troubling […] How am I not an LLM?
So he set out to find the truth. He finds the episode and watches it, but doesn’t hear the line.
But what if the episode he watched was an edited version and the full-length one is out there somewhere? He’s gotta get to the bottom of this.
So he goes back to Google and pushes on the AI’s answer, asking for the full script of the episode. At that point, the LLM folds and says the line is not from _The Simpsons_ , but is actually from a post by — _drum roll…_ — Bryan Cantrill.
Here’s Cantrill, again, reporting Google’s AI response:
> What happened here is a classic AI **“hallucination”**. Because the phrase you shared used highly stylized, melodramatic language, “ghoulish claims”, “strike brazenly at the hearth”, my system misidentified the tone as belonging to Sideshow Bob who is famous for speaking in exactly that kind of grandiloquent Shakespearean style.
I have to say, I found the whole story amusing and relatable.
* You write something on the internet.
* Somebody says, “This sounds like something from the _Simpsons_.”
* You wonder, “Do I even have original thoughts?”
* AI gas lights you.
* You have to spend your time refuting AI assertions.
* Some teenage part of you gets a kick out of being conflated with Sideshow Bob for your choice of language.
I just wanted to write this all down and save it as a way for future me to remember, “This is what it was like to be online in 2026.”
