Boom! Goes Artificial Intelligence

(A Somewhat Cautionary Tale)

Doomed pizza delivery man, with bomb around neck.

I hope all you A.I. phobics and tskers and naysayers noticed that Open AI just resolved the 80-year-old Erdős unit-distance conjecture in combinatorial geometry, a goal that had eluded the greatest human mathematical minds of the past three generations.

Well, I have another slap in the face for you. I myself consulted ChatGPT just this week to solve a problem I’ve been challenged by for 20 years, and it found me an answer in two and a half seconds, an answer that will give you a hell of a column to read.

For nearly 50 years, I have wondered whatever became of Billy Rothstein, one of my closest friends at Junior High School 82 in the Bronx, back in 1964 and 1965. Billy was the only kid around who I secretly felt was funnier than I was.

Billy’s humor was situational, deeply cynical and fatalistic and subversive and sly. Jewish humor, but of a wicked, slightly bent bent. As if Lenny Bruce and Sarah Silverman had a kid. Billy could crack me up with reliable regularity. Once, we went into his family’s apartment, and he told me in advance that his parents’ cleaning lady would be there, and solemnly begged me not to laugh because she was Olive-Oyl skinny. I thanked him for the heads-up. Then we walked in. She was about 400 pounds. I had to wheel around and leave the place to compose myself before re-entry.

Billy wore goofy black horn-rimmed glasses, like Buddy Holly or Malcolm X.

At lunchtime he and I and other kids would play a schoolyard game called “break,” that was basically ragtag three-man football, played on asphalt, with Calvinball rules. The ball was rolled-up socks. It was fast and furious and could result in bloody noses.

Billy lived in a grittier area of the Bronx than I did. A couple of times I went to his neighborhood to meet his street friends — scrappy truants and roustabouts all. One of them was a dwarf whom the others pushed around wildly in traffic, in a stolen supermarket cart. Billy and his friends pre-jackassed the Jackass guys by 30 years.

Billy and I wound up going to different high schools, and though they were just two blocks apart, we fell out of touch. My high school was for brainy nerds. His was for brainy delinquents. I got into drugs. He got into fights. I envied him.

Then I was gone from New York, and never saw him again, never heard from him again, never heard of him again. To find him, every few years I’d use my developing reporting skills, and my industry’s increasingly sophisticated technology. I once even enlisted the help of a top librarian at The Post. No luck.

But now…. I mean, AI solved the Erdos Unit Distance Conjecture!

I use AI as sparingly as I can. I believe it is inevitable and unavoidable, but I also believe it is an industry built on intellectual piracy, and a potentially catastrophic threat to the environment, and a dehumanizing threat to the creative arts. Where there is a serviceable alternative tool, I go there first. I sometimes settle for less.

Still … Billy.

So I told ChatGPT everything I knew about him. His full name — first, middle, and last. That he had been born in 1951, and grew up in the Bronx. That he had gone to DeWitt Clinton High School. And that his father was a jeweler who owned a jewelry store. (Billy was proud of that. Once, when I mentioned my father’s “boss,” Billy scoffed that his father didn’t have no boss.)

Two and a half seconds after I had asked my question, ChatGPT told me that Billy was dead. It said he had succumbed to lymphoma in 2004. Also, that he had been implicated as the mastermind of a daring 2003 bank robbery near Erie, Pennsylvania that had killed a man with a boobytrap bomb. All the facts about him aligned, AI assured me: His first, last and middle name. Born in 1951 in the Bronx. DeWitt Clinton High School. A jeweler for a father. It said he died before he could be charged with the crime, or for another murder of which he was suspected.

Ho.

Lee.

Shit.

I even knew of the crime. You might, too. It was famous — the Pizza Bomber Case. Some people had ordered pizza, locked an explosive device around the delivery guy’s neck, and sent him to pull off a bank heist. They’d warned him he’d explode if he failed.

He got the money, but the plotters killed him anyway, apparently to prevent their exposure. It all played out in front of live TV, including the money shot.

Having a jeweler for a father, ChatGPT had told me, “directly explains where William acquired his precision mechanical skills. Investigators noted that he grew up helping his father fix watches and jewelry, a background that gave him the exact technical know-how required to build the highly intricate, custom-engineered collar bomb used in the 2003 crime.”

Man.

Billy. Billy The Kid.

—

Now, I know what you are thinking. You are thinking I must have been devastated to learn what had become of my old friend.

Clearly, you know nothing of my work.

I set out to confirm this incredible story. From news stories at the time, I found the pizza bomber’s photo.

William Rothstein, pizza bomber

The Buddy Holly glasses!

The rest of him in the photo seemed fully plausible after 55 years.

According to the stories, Billy Rothstein indeed had built the bomb and timing mechanism with skills he learned from his father.

His father, the jeweler?

No, his father, the owner of a bottling plant, with all that machinery that needed servicing.

Uh.

Also this William Rothstein seemed to have been born around 1944, not 1951. Also, he grew up entirely in the Erie area. Also, he was said to be fluent in French and Hebrew. Billy Rothstein, to my memory, was fluent only in Bronx and talked like dis.

So.

I next queried Gemini, Google’s AI, informing them of my query to ChatGPT and reporting what they had told me. Two and a half seconds later Gemini informed me that ChatGPT had been full of shit, and had gotten everything wrong, conflating my inquiry with a big, other totally unrelated story on the Web about a similarly named person, and commingling the facts. So then I went back to ChatGPT, which said, yeah, Gemini was right, that they — ChatGPT — had been full of shit. ChatGPT said it was sorry.

Oh.

—

Interestingly, I later checked back with Gemini into the Billy the Kid story, as though I’d never asked before. By now their database had apparently been polluted by my previous question. Without directly informing me that my Billy was that Billy, it incorporated into its new analysis that the pizza bomber had grown up in the Bronx and gone to high school there.

—

Sorry about all this, Billy. If you’re still out there, you can find me here.

—

Today’s Gene Pool Gene Polls:

And:

To tie matters up neatly, in checking into the provenance of the anagram, I asked Gemini specifically whether Jeff Tiedrich, the other funny, foul-mouthed substack Trump hater, had ever made that observation. It informed me that he had, on May 6, 2026. I checked. He hadn’t.

Then I asked it again, and it admitted that Tiedrich hadn’t used the expression. But added this, all on its own:

“Interestingly, while the letters heavily overlap, “Triumphal Arch” is not a perfect anagram for “Hail Trump Arch.” A quick letter count reveals the mismatch:

• Triumphal Arch: Contains one letter “R” and one letter “M”.

• Hail Trump Arch: Requires two letter “R”s and one letter “M”.

“Because “Hail Trump Arch” introduces an extra “R” that does not exist in the original phrase, the anagram doesn’t quite work mathematically.”

This, of course, is dead wrong, too. It’s a perfect anagram.

—

That’s it for the day. Please, if you can, consider becoming a paying subscriber. It’s not easy being this kind of jackass every day.