In case anyone else is wondering - Robin is the ex-wife of another prominent linguist, George Lakoff.
Somehow GPT-5 got this badly wrong when I first asked:
Yes — George Lakoff and Robin Lakoff are related. They are siblings.
Er, no. They were married once and divorced 50 years ago according to their Wikipedia pages.
coke12 · 6h ago
What a fascinating semantic mistake. Is it possible being long-divorced is more similar to being siblings than we realize?
bryan2 · 6h ago
I would sincerely hope not.
add-sub-mul-div · 5h ago
This question may well be the rosetta stone for the cultural divide over AI.
diggan · 5h ago
I don't think it means much except you need to enable "web" or searching at least for most models to deal well with facts, and that's probably for the better.
Somehow GPT-5 got this badly wrong when I first asked:
Er, no. They were married once and divorced 50 years ago according to their Wikipedia pages.Even a basic search tool + GPT-OSS-20b handles it correctly it seems to me (https://gist.github.com/victorb/de69a8c2169e6a7cc1989592419b...), if I guessed what prompt you used correctly, "Were George Lakoff and Robin Lakoff related?".
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/15/us/robin-lakoff-dead.html...