Tag Archives: Walt Mossberg

Google Bard has had a fuzzy sense of my Washington Post career

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Rejection hurts, but does it hurt more or less when a faceless conversational artificial-intelligence chatbot has done the rejection? And when the rejection comes in the form of erasing a large chunk of one’s career?

Trying out Google Bard, the “large language model” AI that Google opened up to U.S. users in March, forced me to think about questions like that. It started when I saw a Mastodon post from my Fast Company editor Harry McCracken recounting how Bard reported having no information about him–and then, after Harry asked the exceedingly resume-specific query “Who’s the guy who worked at PC World and then started Technologizer and then worked at TIME and now works at Fast Company?,” Bard responded by giving credit not to him but to my old Yahoo Tech colleague David Pogue.

Screenshot of Google Bard attempting to answer "Who is Rob Pegoraro?" and "Who wrote a personal-tech column for the Washington Post from 1999 to 2011?"

I had to repeat the experiment, but I didn’t see quite the same results. While I got the same “I do not have enough information about that person” brushoff to a who-is query about myself, asking “Who wrote a personal-technology column for the Washington Post from 1999 until 2011?” yielded a flattering response that said I currently write for USA Today (not any more) and Wired (never have); had earlier written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Atlantic (the last is true); and had won a National Press Club Award for Consumer Journalism and the Gerald Lob Award for Commentary (if only).

A few days later, I tried again and got a different set of results. Once again, Bard couldn’t say who I was–but this time, asking who wrote a personal-tech column for the Post until 2011 led to Bard naming former WSJ tech columnist and all-around mensch Walt Mossberg. Walt has won a Loeb award, so maybe Bard’s earlier “hallucination” (the current term of art for a conversational AI making shit up) involved a fusion of his c.v. and mine?

A few days later, I took myself out of this equation by asking a Google rep at a tech-policy event in D.C. Monday to repeat my searches. She, too, saw Bard decline to answer a who-is question about me and then reassign my Post column to somebody else–this time, Wired’s Steven Levy, another member of the graybeard tech-writer contingent. The Google rep clicked the thumbs-down “Bad response” button (which I thought I’d done earlier, but maybe not) and invited me to write the correction.

But my pointing out that I wrote the Post’s personal-tech column over those years apparently needed more than three days to get processed. Because when I tried the same series of questions Thursday, I got the same “I do not have enough information” answer to “Who is Rob Pegoraro” and a comparable erasure of my Post history:

Steven Levy wrote the Washington Post’s personal-tech column from 1999 to 2011. He is an American journalist and author who has written extensively about technology and the internet. He is the author of several books, including Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, and In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives.

Once again, I clicked the “Bad response” button but this time also talked back to Bard: “Try again.”

The answer this time:

Rob Pegoraro wrote the Washington Post’s personal-tech column from 1999 to 2011.

Victory at last! Or maybe just for now.

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I can stop trying to keep up with Walt Mossberg

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After 23 years or so of writing about consumer technology, it’s time to slack off a little: Walt Mossberg’s last column ran today, so I don’t have to keep up with him anymore.

That was never easy, starting the day the Post somehow gave me my own tech column. I can only recall two times when I beat or tied Walt to a story about Apple, then as now Topic A among tech writers. Once was a review of the first shipping version of Mac OS X, when a guy at a local user group handed me a copy of that release before Apple PR would. The other was a writeup of iDVD that benefited from my willingness to stay up until 3 or 4 a.m. a couple of nights in a row.

In the summer of 2000, the Post ran a front-page profile of Walt; being a guy in his late 20s with more ego than circumstances warranted, I took it poorly. But I always liked talking shop with my competitor at tech events around D.C., the Bay Area and elsewhere. (Does anybody have video of the 2006 panel featuring myself, Walt, the late Steve Wildstrom, Kevin Maney and Stephanie Stahl in which we shared an airing of grievances about tech-PR nonsense?) And when I announced my exit from the Post in 2011, the guy with one of the busier inboxes in all of tech journalism took a moment to e-mail his condolences and wish me good luck.

Since then, Walt has remained a must-read writer, provided the occasional column idea, and been one of the people I enjoy running into at conferences. He’s a mensch–or, to translate that from the Yiddish I know almost nothing of to my native Jersey-speak, a stand-up guy.

Enjoy your retirement, Walt. But please try not to taunt the rest of us too much when we’re off to yet another CES and you can finally spend that week in January as normal human beings do.