Generative AI in 2025 Vs. Computers on Television in 1978

Computer vs. Kotter

As the IMDB summary in the screenshot below says, this 17th episode in the third season of Welcome Back Kotter featured a computer capable of speaking about any episode in history brought into the classroom to replace the teacher's lectures. Mr. Kotter finds he no longer has to spend time preparing lessons or even grading assignments but doesn't enjoy feeling useless. The seathogs have their own way of resolving that problem and indicate the usual assumption always portrayed on TV that young people just know how to hack computers without any need for formal training. 

Mr. Kotter insists at the end of the program that the computer should be used as a tool but not to replace the human experience of teaching. I found that fascinating that this was portrayed in early 1978 because very few schools were even bringing computers in at that stage. 

Also while the ELIZA chatbot  was born in 1966, it would have carried on conversation via text rather than voice. Also the chatbot could work by responding directly to your input rather like the computer does when Mr. Kotter types in a joke, but it would not have been capable of delivering a lecture on whatever historical topic the teacher typed in, as depicted in "Meet Your New Teacher: Batteries Not Included." There is never any explanation offered about how it is fed data to work with (unlike the computer in the 1957 movie Deskset)

IMDB listing for the episode in question

AI Today

But in 2025, it certainly would be possible given computers ability to tap into the information uploaded to the internet with AI conversion of text to voice, as well. But how does actual generative AI measure up? Ironically, not all that well in context of a very simple query. 

As I discovered Mr. Kotter attempting to get the computer to appreciate one of his uncle jokes via  a video compendium of his jokes, I didn't know which episode to look for and so decided to ask generative AI for help. I presented this query to Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT: In which episode of "Welcome Back Kotter" did Mr. Kotter type a joke into a computer?

Claude completely missed the mark, suggesting such an episode didn't exist and offering its own reasons why I likely was wrong. This is what it wrote: 

I don't recall an episode of "Welcome Back, Kotter" where Mr. Kotter typed a joke into a computer. The show ran from 1975 to 1979, a time when personal computers were just emerging and not commonly featured in television shows, especially in classroom settings.

"Welcome Back, Kotter" was set in a Brooklyn high school where Gabe Kotter (played by Gabe Kaplan) taught a group of underachieving students known as the "Sweathogs." The show primarily focused on classroom interactions, the students' antics, and Kotter's relationship with them, typically using traditional teaching methods rather than technology.

Since my knowledge has a cutoff date, there's a small possibility I might be missing something, but computers were not a significant part of the show's premise or regular storylines. If you're thinking of a specific episode that featured this scenario, it may be from another show or a different context.

Gemini was much more helpful in this context, identifying the correct episode and linking to the IMDB page associated with it.  Here's what it answered: 

Based on the search results, the episode of "Welcome Back, Kotter" where Mr. Kotter interacts with a computer and attempts to tell it a joke is:

• "Meet Your New Teacher: Batteries Not Included" (Season 3, Episode 17)

Here's a key takeaway from the search results:

• The episode features Mr. Woodman bringing a computer into the Sweathogs' classroom. ¹  
  1. Back, Kotter" Meet Your New Teacher: Batteries Not Included (TV Episode 1978) - IMDb

  

  www.imdb.com
• Mr. Kotter does indeed attempt to tell the computer a joke, with less than stellar results.

ChatGPT's response was similar, but I can't account for why it offers a different air date than what is found on IMDB or imputes a particular motive to Mr. Kotter's attempt to the tell the computer a joke.  The the computer doesn't get the joke is not necessarily a slight on its intelligence, as Mr. Kotter's uncle jokes tend to be more groan-worthy than laugh-worthy.  Here's what it wrote: 

​In the "Welcome Back, Kotter" episode titled "Meet Your New Teacher: Batteries Not Included," Mr. Kotter interacts with a computer introduced into his classroom. This episode is the 17th of the third season, which originally aired on February 18, 1978. In this episode, Vice Principal Woodman brings a computer into the Sweathogs' class to teach their lessons, leading to a significant increase in their grades. Feeling jealous and concerned about being replaced, Mr. Kotter attempts to engage with the computer. At the end of the episode, he tries to tell the computer a joke, but the computer does not respond, highlighting the limitations of technology in replacing human interaction. ​Ultimate 70s+10IMDb+10Inner Mind+10

Conclusion

While I do like using Claude for certain tasks, it seems that it suffers from a major shortcoming in making sense of data that should have been accessible to it via the internet. But there's also something very meta about observing the the latest -- of the free -- versions of generative AI only being capable of answering question when they have taken in specific data about them. No computer can simply start lecturing about a historical episode without taking in the relevant data.  And once again, we are reminded that the output of computers depends on what the input is. 

Related:


Add a pinch of salt to creative claims for AI

Bard vs Bard: why you can't just accept the first AI prompt response
AI's early attempts at screenwriting
The perils of prompt engineering
An A/B test of generative AI
Bard brings in the clowns

Got Goats?

Goats munching on weeds in Norman Levy Park: Photo by Ariella Brown

 

The sight of carpet-like, green lawn may be priceless, but what goes into preparing it is a multi-billion dollar market. In 2023, The global lawn mowers market  was valued at a whopping $32.31 billion. 

Most of those sales  don't come from your basic manual style that relies on the rotary blade turned when you push it. While that style of lawn mower doesn’t take a toll on the environment, most people –and the gardeners that they employ – use machines powered by gas or electricity.  

While those machines have evolved to now feature advanced technology like GPS and even claims of AI, there is a simultaneous movement to embrace the very low tech approach to grass cutting that predates the invention of the lawn mower in 1830. 

Let’s take a brief tour of mowing grass from the 1700s to the present. 

Parklands in the 1700s

When you picture a park, something like Central Park may spring to mind. Today’s parks are  public spaces that offer a respite of green lawns and trees, especially in urban areas.

But back in the days of large country estates, a park could, in fact, be the private property of one wealthy family. 

That’s certainly the case of Mansfield Park, the estate that was featured as the title for one of  Jane Austen’s novels.Mansfield Park was written some time after Lacelot Capability Brown had reshaped the English landscape with rolling lawn and naturally set trees, shrubs, and bodies of water. His landscape designs offered a softer, less artificial effect to gardens than the formal garden styles that had been popularized by the very wealthy on the Continent. 

Those acres of grass needed to be trimmed regularly. One way was with grazing animals, typically sheep, who would also furnish the estate with wool, or possibly even cows that would provide milk. This required no more work than bringing the animals out to do what they do naturally, and they also provided the fertilizer in the same manner.

Another way that grass was kept in shape was through very arduous human labor. This is something that only the really wealthy could afford, hiring a team of gardeners merely to beautify their land with no yield of produce resulting from the work. 

A manicured lawn was a very visible sign of wealth and status. This is what is depicted in Leo Tolstoy’s novel  Anna Karenina. 

If you’ve read the book  or seen it rendered into film, you may have been struck by the sheer physical labor involved in mowing. As you can see in the clip below, it took a small army of men armed with scythes many hours to cut the grass neatly. 

it would seem that  the lawn mower had not made its way over to Tolstoy's part of Russia by 1873 -- when his book was release in installments. But a machine to reduce the amount of exertion necessary to trim grass had already been invented in England over forty years before that.

The first lawn mower 

Edwin Beard Budding, an engineer from Stroud, Gloucestershire, England invented the lawn mower in 1830. He is said to have taken the concept of its operation from the operation of  a machine in a cloth mill that employed  a cutting cylinder (or bladed reel)  to trim the surface of woolen cloth and leave it with  a smooth finish.

According to the post on “Mower History,” published by The Old Lawnmower Club, Budd partnered with another  engineer named  John Ferrabee to produce his mower design in a factory. A number of museums in the UK showcase such machines, and you can see a photo of one here.

Budding’s invention was actually not quite the design we use today, though it certainly paved the way. The lawn mower went through a number of improvements through other English inventors.

One of them was the Silens Messor, which was introduced by Thomas Green and Sons of Leeds and London in 1859. Using a chain to transfer power from the roller in the back to the cutting cylinder made it both more reliable and quieter to operate, hence the name, which means silent operation in Latin.

The first American patent for a lawn mower was awarded  1868 to Amariah Hills of Connecticut. It employed a reel-type spiral-bladed cutter” Two years later, Elwood McGuire came up with a “lighter, simpler machine” that was very popular. But there was yet another innovation at the very end of the century.

The improved lawn mower is an African-American invention

On  Sept. 8, 1898, John Albert Burr applied for a patent for his lawn mower design. He was granted U.S. patent 624,749 on May 9, 1899. The application describes the uniqueness of his invention as follows:

This invention relates to improvements in lawn-mowers of the most common type, comprising traction-wheels and a rotary cutter or shear operating in conjunction with a fixed bar relative to which the curved knife of the rotary cutter has shearing actions.

Why lawn mowers became so popular

Burr enjoyed quite a bit of success from his invention because it emerged at a time when gardening was taking off for the middle class. That’s what is posited in the American Gardening  blog post entitled, “Victorian Middle Class Wanted the Lawn Mower.”

While English gardens may have set the expectation for lawns on middle class homes, it also took root in American soil, thanks to the influence of prominent landscapers like Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903).He is the one who set out the vision for New York City’s Central Park in 1858 to include a Sheep Meadow. 

Sheep did in fact graze there, trimming and fertilizing the grass the old-fashioned way between 1864 and 1934. They were considered to add a “Romantic English quality” to the landscape.

 But for people who sought to emulate the look of neat grass without having to keep farm animals, there had to be another option beyond the heavy investment in labor with a scythe and so the lawn mower became a necessity for the fashionable home adorned by a lawn.

The blog quotes Mark Laird, who wrote in The Flowering of the Landscape Garden: English Pleasure Grounds 1720-1800: “Not until gardening became the leisure occupation of many new middle-class town dwellers did the mechanization of mowers begin.”

The Victorian Middle Class Wanted the Lawn Mower blog shows an ad for the Buckeye Lawn Mower from Springfield, Massachusetts from some time in the 1890s. It shows a fashionably dressed woman accompanied by an equally fashionably dressed girl who is pushing a lawn mower.Here mowing is depicted as a genteel, ladylike act of gardening, a far cry from the sweat-inducing labor we saw in Anna Karenina. 

Fueling lawn mowers and pollution

Mowing actually did become a lot more effortless thanks to motorization. Te Old Lawnmower Club dates “lightweight petrol [what we call gas in the U.S.] engines and small steam power units: all the way back to the 1890s. 

 Over in the United States, gas-powered mowers were first manufactured in 1919 by  Colonel Edwin George. But it was too costly for homeowners until after World War II.

Affordable gas-powered mowers, no doubt, promoted a lot of green lawns to adorn the houses sprouting up in new suburban neighborhoods after the war. The design of tractor-like models that didn’t need to be pushed but driven to cover large areas quickly and easily were particularly appealing to those who had large areas to mow.. 

In 1948  Max Swisher of Missouri invented an innovative zero-turn mower  called  the “Ride King..” As the name indicates the wheel could be turned 180 degrees, which eliminated the need to turn the whole thing around when tackling a new row. .

How green was my lawnmower?

Advances like these made mowing more efficient, though the green effect is not all that green in terms of energy consumption.

The stats on the resources expended to keep up green lawns in the United States are rather alarming. “Lawns use about 800 million gallons of gasoline a year to harvest their ‘crop’ of grass with lawnmowers, about 1/4 of 1% of national petroleum use,” according to Reducing Water for Lawns.

Regulations on emissions for lawn mowers only approached the stringency of those applied to cars in 2008, As a result, they are now cleaner than they had been, though how clean depends on what you choose.

What about electric power?

 Electric lawn mowers have been around for decades, but they were generally not as popular as gas-powered ones in part because they were tethered to a cord. However, this is changing with new designs. I bought one myself a few years ago from Worx. It came with rechargeable batteries. A single charge powers up all the mowing of the front and back lawn.

New robotic mowers also rely on electric power and are charged in docking stations. They can also include such technological marvels as “laser vision, smart navigation, garden mapping, memory, and self-emptying” which make them even more convenient to use than gas-powered mowers.

Remote control lawn mowers started emerging around the beginning of our current century. But in the past year or two, you’d more likely see them rebranded as “AI-powered.”  One of the companies benign them calls the line Electric Sheep. The name is a perfect segue to the sheep and goat used in the past that have made a comeback as an environmentally sound solution for trimming grass and weeds.   

 Putting the Goat back in Gotham

Goats can reach where people and most machines cannot, and what is work for people is just grazing for them.Accordingly, On May 21, 2019 Riverside Park Conservancy launched what it calls Goathem. It introduced goats to trim back the invasive plants in hard-to-reach section of the park.

As “goats are naturally effective weed whackers,” the park explains, “putting them to work in Goatham is like treating them to an all-you-can-eat buffet.” They can even eat poison ivy with no ill effects. 

While the New York City park may not admit it, the inspiration for its use of goats may have come from the Norman J. Levy Park and Preserve in Merrick. The goats pictures above are from there. 

The original group of Nigerian dwarf goats joined the park the early years of the current century and have since multiplied over the generations. They’ve also been augmented by 5 new goats and 2 new sheep that joined in May 2023. They all contribute to clearing the grounds and  maintaining the environment in this park.  

So we’ve come full circle in recognizing what animals can contribute as natural lawn mower even while packing even more bells and whistles in the machine designed for the job back in 1830.

If you have a lawn, how do you deal with maintaining it?

Related:
A grand vision of Victorian architecture and engineering

Discovering Buckminster Fuller on Long Island

Jane Austen and Capability Brown

How many times did Edison fail in attempting to invent the lightbulb?

Add a pinch of salt to creative claims for AI

Sometimes someone or even somethings -- as in the case of generative AI -- will confidently assert something to be true. Don't suspend your disbelief. Investigate and demand the basis for that claim. 

Creative  lies from AI

Having investigated the output of both Chat GPT and Bard, I have concluded that you always have to fact-check whatever generative AI tells you because it is prone to what is called hallucinations. 

In fact, as related in The perils of prompt engineering, Bard  does not hesitate to fabricate facts and will double-down on its assertions with even more hallucinational as it spins out an even more elaborate web of AI-generated reality. 

While I remain baffled about what motivates AI to generate false information when it should have access to all the data necessary to report accurately,I can't say that humans have a monopoly on data-backed truth. They may not fabricate editions out of thin air, but they are quite prone to fabricate conclusions on the flimsiest of pretexts.

To profess is human 

Unlike the AI thought process, I can understand the human motivation in this case.  Human want to make a name for himself (really it is most often a he) about an area and knows that saying something surprising will get more attention than reporting what people expect. 

Knowing that some kind of apparently scientific approach is needed to justify the claim,the person just draws on a handful of students, gives them the task, and draws conclusions that turn into a major claim based on those very limited results. 

I've read a lot of Dan Ariely books and really enjoy his insights into human responses and triggers. But I always take them with a grain or two of salt. 

That's because the majority of his experiments involve a tiny, not terribly diverse segment of the population, namely the undergraduates at the university who can be induced to participate. Often that means that his conclusions are based on just two dozen people or so. 

The small sample size doesn't guarantee that the conclusions are incorrect. However, assuming that it is conclusive proof is the classic logical fallacy of hasty generalization. 

What he does with whichever group of students happen to pass by that today is not necessarily replicable by the population at large. It's kind of like just polling your siblings or neighbors to conclude that everyone's favorite flavor of ice cream is chocolate. That may be true, but we'd really need a bigger sample size to be sure.

Claiming AI is more creative than humans

Yet who can fault Ariely for doing this when everyone else does it? Indeed, that is precisely what  Erik Guzik, Assistant Clinical Professor of Management at University of Montana did for is article in The Conversation entitled  "AI scores in the top percentile of creative thinking." 

What does a person who just reads that title think was involved in making such a claim for AI creativity?  It sounds like thousands of creative people were compared to the AI to determine that its output was comparable to the top 1%.

But that's not what happened at all. Instead, this major claim is based on nothing more than 24 students whose output was deemed to be not all that creative relative to the output of ChatGPT(after 4 iterations, it sounds like) based on the assessment of the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, or TTCT.

We get very little shared about what the process for the students was and how they scored. The only clue we get about the creative prowess of ChatGPT is the professor's assertion:

Consider the following prompt offered to GPT-4: “Suppose all children became giants for one day out of the week. What would happen?” The ideas generated by GPT-4 touched on culture, economics, psychology, politics, interpersonal communication, transportation, recreation and much more – many surprising and unique in terms of the novel connections generated.

This combination of novelty and utility is difficult to pull off, as most scientists, artists, writers, musicians, poets, chefs, founders, engineers and academics can attest.

Yet AI seemed to be doing it – and doing it well. 

Notice that the professor is merely telling us that ChatGPT did well. He fails to show us the creativity by sharing the actual output and letting us see a contrast between it and even one of the 24 students who may well have all been math or engineering majors who don't considers themselves creative writers at all.

 

My own test

This is not a strict replication because I had to use ChatGPT3.5 instead of 4, but it should still show what most people would actually get when putting exactly that prompt to the generative AI. Here's its response enclosed in rows of stars:

*************************************************************************

If all children were to magically transform into giants for a single day each week, the world would undoubtedly witness a fascinating array of changes and events:

1. Physical Transformations: The sudden change in size would lead to various practical adjustments. Everyday items like furniture, clothing, and even vehicles might need to be redesigned or adapted to accommodate the giant children.

2. Playful Activities: Children would engage in unique and imaginative activities that capitalize on their newfound size. Parks and playgrounds would transform into vast landscapes for epic games, obstacle courses, and adventures.

3. Exploration: With their enhanced height, children could explore their surroundings from a different perspective, possibly leading to new discoveries or insights about their environment.

4. Education and Learning: Schools might introduce special days to leverage the giants' size advantage for educational purposes. Science classes, for instance, could involve experiments that demonstrate the effects of size on various phenomena.

5. Social Interactions: The dynamics of social interactions might shift as children grapple with their changing sizes. Friendships could take on new dimensions, and children might learn valuable lessons about empathy and acceptance.

6. Impact on Economy: The demand for goods and services tailored to giant children could create unique economic opportunities. Businesses might offer oversized toys, clothing, and other products on the designated giant day.

7. Environmental Impact: The increased scale of activities could lead to concerns about environmental effects. Authorities might need to manage waste, traffic, and other logistics associated with giant-sized activities.

8. Scientific Exploration: Scientists and researchers would be intrigued by the temporary transformation and could use the opportunity to study the physiological, psychological, and ecological impacts of such a phenomenon.

9. Creativity and Art: Artists and creators would likely draw inspiration from the whimsical idea, resulting in a surge of giant-themed literature, artwork, movies, and more.

10. Sense of Wonder: The experience of becoming giants would foster a sense of wonder and imagination among children, encouraging them to think beyond conventional boundaries and consider new possibilities.

Overall, a day when all children become giants would be a remarkable and unforgettable event that would influence various aspects of society, culture, and individual experiences. It would provide a unique chance for children and adults alike to see the world from an entirely different perspective and explore the imaginative and transformative power of change.

************************************************************************

Color me not impressed. This is just an analysis of various points of view one can take on such a scenario presented in a fairly analytical way. It's not at all what I consider creative output. What would be creative is to construct a story in which some -- but not all -- of the possibilities delineated would be manifested. But simply listing them as possible considerations is analytical rather than creative thinking.  

Visit WriteWayPro.weebly.com  Like and follow on Facebook and on LinkedIn

Related: Why you always need the original source  A matter of degree Bard vs Bard,