In 1985, a $65,000 piece of software came with a hundred-page list of everything that didn't work yet. Nobody complained. Today, AI ships with perfect confidence and no caveats -- and sometimes it invents a baseball player. This episode is about how we inverted the relationship between price and tolerance, why AI broke it completely, and the one prompt you can use right now to catch what it's making up.
IN THIS EPISODE
The $65,000 magnetic tape and what my mom said when she found out the price
Why expensive software got more forgiveness than free apps -- and what that says about us
How ChatGPT launched without release notes and why that matters
The Detroit Tigers player who doesn't exist -- and how confident AI was about him
The hallucination-about-hallucinations moment that proved the whole argument
One prompt to paste after any AI response that matters to you
LINKS
Full essay + the self-check prompt → marksylvester.substack.com
Coastal Intelligence → coastalintelligence.ai
EVERYWHERE Studio → https://everywherestudio.ai/
SUBSTACK LINK https://open.substack.com/pub/marksylvester/p/the-more-you-pay-the-less-you-expect
Paste the published Substack URL here after the episode goes live.
Mark Sylvester is co-founder of Coastal Intelligence, an AI think tank and consultancy. EVERYWHERE Studio™ is his platform for thought leaders, because the ideas in your head belong everywhere.
