Poodle clipping & Snapchat: Who can we trust?
In which we explore lockdown projects, forgotten Olympic events, poodle clipping, Snapchat, and ChatGPT.
Every family the world over must have their lockdown story, their desperate attempts to stave off the boredom, keep the children busy, and stay sane.
In the early days, when the Schools failed to live up to their role as educationalists, and effectively palmed the whole thing off on parents, I decided to set up a ‘weekly challenge’ for the family. Some kind of project that might keep the children occupied, and (let’s face it) off their screens.
Challenges included: devising a board game; creating a new country (replete with language, customs, food etc), creating quizzes, inventing a new sport, and giving a powerpoint presentation (I know, I know…)
Thankfully, the children rose to the various challenges, partly on the condition that my wife and I also took part.
When it came to ‘Powerpoint week’, I thought it would be fun to delve into the world of ‘Forgotten Olympic Events’. As a boy, I had cherished a book on the history of the Olympics, and vaguely remembered grainy photos of men with handlebar moustaches doing things like the ‘standing high jump’.
In fact, a cursory search on Google reveals a litany of even more bizarre events, all shamefully discarded. What modern Olympics wouldn’t be livened up by a spot of ‘Pistol Duelling’ or ‘One-handed weightlifting’? To say nothing of ‘Long jump for horses’, or a good old-fashioned ‘Tug-of-War’.
These events mostly took place in the early days of the modern Olympics, from 1896 to the mid 1920’s. Each Summer Games had its particular range of delicacies for spectators to sample. But the prize for the most outlandish, and the zenith of the truly bizarre, has to be the Games held in Paris in 1900.
All of which brings me to the ‘Poodle Clipping’ of the title…
Paris 1900 was only the second Olympiad of the modern era, and the Olympics was still in its infancy.
Many of the familiar Sports were already there: Athletics, Rowing, Swimming, Shooting – and have remained ever since. Some sports made a brief appearance, only to fade from the memory. Cricket and Croquet had their moment in the sun, before retreating to gentler English villages.
And sadly, there is probably no-one alive today who remembers the ‘200m swimming obstacle race’.
To further complicate matters for the amateur historian, the 1900 games were not run by an official Olympic committee, but were held as an appendage to the World Fair. Consequently, there were a large number of events which didn’t achieve official Olympic status, but were part of the Olympic celebration all the same.
And they ranged from the comical to the truly bonkers.
Highlights included ‘Cannon shooting’, ‘Fire-fighting’, ‘Hot air ballooning’ (won by Comte Henry de la Vaux who flew from Paris to Kiev), and ‘Live Pigeon shooting’, in which an unfortunate 300 birds were massacred by the competitors who paid 200 francs for the privilege.
No doubt the devotees of the latter ‘sport’ would have argued that it was part of a long and noble hunting tradition. The same could not be said, however, for another event, probably the single most bizarre ever to appear at the Olympics.
I refer to the aforementioned ‘Poodle Clipping’.
This splendid event took place in the leafy environment of the Bois de Boulogne on a sunny April afternoon. Competitors had exactly two hours to clip the fur off as many poodles as they could.
It must have been quite the sight for the 6,000 spectators who turned up to watch, perhaps in awe of the competitors’ speed with the shears, or their ability to control the more frisky mutts. Perhaps they spent the afternoon avoiding the doggy hair that was flying about in the arena, or worrying about tucking into their packed lunches, lest one of the poodles would catch a whiff of the food, and make a dash for a ham sandwich.
It all came to a climax in the late afternoon sun, with a farmer’s wife from the Auvergne declared the winner after clipping a remarkable 17 poodles.
Naturally this unique event had to form the climax of my powerpoint presentation, and I am happy to report that it went down splendidly.
And so we limped our way through to the end of lockdown, and I didn’t give the shorn poodles another thought for almost three years.
Fast forward to June 2023, and onto the second part of the title.
My youngest son has recently joined Snapchat, and has been having a go on its brand new feature, ‘My AI’. According to Snapchat’s website, ‘My AI’ is a chatbot currently available to Snapchatters. It is ‘powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT technology’.
ChatGPT. We’re talking big stuff here. The fount of knowledge. The big scary future.
The question is – how good is it?
I’m sure it knows how many men walked on the moon, and who was the 35th President of the US, and probably even knows what Rishi Sunak had for dinner last night.
But the million dollar question is: does it know that Poodle Clipping used to be in the Olympics? That’s the sort of ‘AI’ I would pay good money for.
So I dive in:
Slightly disappointed by this response, I venture a little more information, conjuring up an imaginary friend, who is whispering in my ear.
“But my friend says it was part of the Olympics in 1900 in Paris”
This time, ‘My AI’ wastes no time in correcting its first response:
Just for the reassurance, I feel that I want a cast-iron guarantee from ‘MY AI’:
Well, perhaps not an A* for ‘My AI’ given it needed a bit of prompting, but it got there in the end.
So, we all go home happy in the knowledge that ‘My AI’ is fully conversant with the more important things in life.
Or can we?
For this story has a twist…
And it is at this point I must beg your apology, for I have deceived you.
The Truth is, there never was an Olympic event for Poodle Clipping.
It never happened. Not in Paris in 1900. Not ever.
All the other bizarre events described above (including the pigeon shooting) really did take place.
But not the poodle clipping. That was a hoax.
But if it was a hoax, how come ‘My AI’, powered by ChatGPT technology, the fount of all digital knowledge, thought it was real, and gave me cast iron assurances that I could share this fact with my friends?
Let me explain.
In 2008, in the run up to the Beijing Olympics, Christopher Lyles of The Daily Telegraph wrote a daily ‘Beijing countdown’ column, a sort of appetiser for the Games. Depending on how many days there were to go, he would give a little snippet of information relating to that number.
And on April 1st, it was exactly 128 days to kickoff, so his column began:
“128: The number of competitors who participated in the poodle-clipping event at the 1900 Olympics in Paris. The event was held in the leafy environs of the Bois de Boulogne and it was the only occasion that it featured as an Olympic discipline….”
And concluded with:
“… The gold medal was won by Avril Lafoule, a 37-year-old farmer's wife from the Auvergne region of France… ”
If the date of the article wasn’t an immediate giveaway, surely the name of the winner ‘Avril Lafoule’ was more than a serious wink to the readers.
Yes, it was a good old April Fool, of the kind the British press in particular are so fond.
Initially, the article didn’t garner much interest.
But a few months later, it began appearing online, where it was detached from its original context, and some details were missing (notably, the date of publication and the name of the gold-medal winner, Avril Lafoule).
And put into the context of other bonkers events (greased-pole climbing, mud-fighting..), perhaps it didn’t seem so ridiculous.
By the time the Olympic games began in August, this ‘Poodle Clipping’ event had become a ‘fact’, and was repeated in such publications as The Sunday Times, The Sun, China Daily, The Guardian and even featured on BBC’s live Beijing blog
It became so popular, and accepted as fact, that at one point it garnered almost 25,000 Google search results. And to this day, it continues to be published on many websites, including GQ magazine in July 2021: “The ten weirdest events in Olympics history: from pistol duelling to poodle clipping”.
Now let us return to Snapchat..
For this was the real reason I asked the specific question about Poodle Clipping: I was interested to see how ‘My AI’ would deal with something that was made up, but where (in all probability) the vast majority of mentions on the Internet say that it actually happened.
Would it be able to separate fact from fiction?
From its initial answers, it would seem not.
So let’s see what happens when we nudge it with a little more info.
Back to my imaginary friend again, spoiling the party:
“But my friend says that the poodle clipping never happened, that it was all a hoax…”
Now with a little virtual egg on its face, ‘My AI’ fesses up to its inadequacies:
No doubt Snapchat’s Chief Executive would point me to the caveat in the Ts & Cs: “it’s possible My AI’s responses may include biased, incorrect, harmful, or misleading content.”
But frankly, who reads the Ts & Cs?
And aren’t we supposed to trust this all new singin-and-dancin technology?
What I find fascinating about this brief foray into the world of ‘Snapchat AI’ is that the answers it gives depend to a large degree on how much information the questioner provides.
The Poodle clipping was not the only question and answer I engaged in. I had a similar ‘back and forth’ on the poetic meter used in ‘The Listeners’, which yielded a similar pattern of semi-correct answers that ‘My AI’ subsequently revised, after more probing from me.
The conclusion doesn’t really need spelling out, but I’ll spell it out anyway: when seeking information, how the heck do we know who or what to trust?
And if we can only garner satisfactory answers if we already know the answer, what on earth is the point of it all?
One final thought on the Poodle Clipping: imagine if the few internet pages that reveal the original hoax were lost. Imagine if some “intelligent” bot scoured the internet and found thousands of pages saying the poodle clipping event happened, and just a couple of ‘rogue’ pages saying it was a hoax.
It might conclude that those rogue pages were wrong.
So it deletes them.
Permanently.
The Poodle clipping is now established as a fact for all time.
If it’s just Poodle Clipping, I guess it doesn’t really matter.
But what if it was something more important?
*****
Great writing and such an important topic. Years ago, I started noticing the quality of writing in online publications going down but it's also declined in terms of accuracy. Consequently, I read everything with a grain of salt which I suppose is a good practice but it does make me wonder what is to become of us when even reputable publications disseminate inaccurate information. The story you highlighted was a light-hearted example but what happens when the inaccuracies stir up more emotion or have political implications? All good food for thought.
Wow. Fantastic writing. Engaging, funny and interesting. Please write more.