Biased Blow-By-Blow - 2026 Paris-Tours

Introduction

Paris-Tours, despite having been run for well over a century, is considered a fairly minor race. And albertnet is considered a fairly minor blog. So this is a great fit. As you can see, the parcours is practically flat:

Those red icons might appear at first blush to be climbs, but I think they’re actually indicators of piles of steaming cow pies on the roadway—which often are a major factor in the outcome of the race. Read on for my unvarnished report that doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to making fun of the riders, the race, or just about anyone or anything that catches my eye.

2026 Paris-Tours – Chartres to Tours

As I join the action, the riders have about 75 kilometers to go. There’s a breakaway of eleven riders with a gap of just under two minutes. The official Paris-Tours website has their own (albeit unbiased, very incomplete, less literary) blow-by-blow that says the riders have entered Indre-et-Loire, the “third and final department on the race route.” Department? Huh?

Peacock didn’t spring for two commentators. It’s just one guy, the kind of mournful sounding dude with the accent—what is it, Australian? I would say it’s Australian except Australians never sound mournful, do they? They always sound like they’re at a barbecue.

Wow, I just took a little “breakaway” of my own (nature calls!) and upon my return there is no commentary at all. Perhaps an audio issue? No, after some time the announcer speaks again. I guess he just ran out of things to say. Or maybe he was on mute.

Wow, a rider gets a flat and there’s no spare bike—maybe budget cuts are hitting the teams, too. Maybe nobody cares about this race. Anyhow, it’s not a terribly slow wheel change, considering modern wheels aren’t even quick release. Can you believe that? Quick release has been available for decades! Before my first race, in 1981, kids were trash-talking each other and made fun of this one kid because he had a Schwinn. The kid sputtered, “Yeah, but it’s a nice one … with quick release!”

The breakaway takes a right turn onto—what’s this? A dirt road! Man, the host towns and villages of this race couldn’t even afford pavement! What kind of rinky-dink race is this?

Tim Merlier (Soudal Quick-Step) punctures but at least his team has sprung for spare bikes. I guess it’s because Merlier is a race favorite.

The lead is down to 1:12 with 56 kilometers to go, so I’m not going to try to figure out the breakaway riders’ names. The official website of this race doesn’t offer a start list, believe it or not. (There’s a placeholder page, but it’s blank.) More budget cuts, I guess. Meanwhile, most of the heavy hitters whom I’d recognize aren’t even here … they raced the more prestigious Giro di Lombardia yesterday. It’s considered a Monument, and offers hotel lodging instead of camping, and paved roads, and a proper website. (Consider yourself lucky this blog isn’t operating on a shoestring budget today, with a fixed courier font or something.) Adding to my reporting challenge today is that cyclingnews isn’t bothering with a blow-by-blow. Let’s see what the Paris-Tours live report is saying: “Les échappés approchent du premier chemin de vigne. Il y en aura 9 au programme pour un total de 10 km.” My French is rusty but I think that means, “The chapped racers are approaching the finest vines. There will be a program at 9pm showing the final 10 kilometers.”

OMG, there’s a crash! I think several riders have fallen asleep and drifted off the side of the road into a ditch!

Wow, the image quality was so poor after I cropped that photo, I just cannot handle it. So I fed it to Gemini to clean up. See any hallucinations? Look at the riders’ numbers. It’s a mess.

Looks like a nice, soft landing at least.

Now, at the front, an explosive attack! It’s Lewis Askey (NSN Cycling Team), who was second place in this race back in 2023. I happen to know that because it was the coolest edition of this race ever, with an American, Riley Sheehan, taking a surprise victory. Sheehan was a neo-pro and didn’t even have a contract, but played his cards perfectly. And you know what makes that especially exciting to me? I raced with Riley’s dad, Clark, back in the day! Anyhow, Sheehan (the younger) is a favorite for today, and is now a teammate of Askey’s on NSN Cycling Team (formerly Israel-Premier Tech, who signed Sheehan for a three-year contract after his win here). It’s really too bad we don’t have Phil Liggett announcing today because he would say things like, “Clark Sheehan attacks!” or maybe “Adri van der Poel attacks!”

The lugubrious sole commentator is saying there are 35 hectares of vineyards in this region. I think he’s reading off a card. He doesn’t have the air of someone who has any idea how much a hectare is. He might as well be saying “a bunch of vineyards.” (Note: I myself do not know how much a hectare is. I would guess it’s more than an acre but less than football field.)

Okay, there are only five riders left in the breakaway so I’ll give you their identities. Looks like Julius van den Berg (Picnic PostNL), Matis Louvel (NSN), Stefan Bissegger (Decathlon CMA CGM), Storm Ingebrigtsen (Uno-X Mobility) and Yves Lampaert (Soudal Quick-Step). Only two of these are household names: Bissegger (who was sixth place in this race last year and eighth at Paris-Roubaix this year) and Lampaert (two-time winner of Dwars door Vlaanderen and a Tour de France stage winner).

Oh for crying out loud, in the time I took to type that paragraph, the lead somehow dropped to 25 seconds. Wait … suddenly it’s back up to 57. What the hell, could they not afford a competent splits-tracker? Is it some kid with a stopwatch and a notepad? Now they’ve removed the number altogether. What’s next … a text-based split? It’ll say, “A ways back”?

The footage now is of Axel Huens (Groupama-FDJ) who is solo, trying to bridge up to the breakaway. I was too slow to grab a photo (literally pointing my phone camera at the screen since Peacock blocks screen grabs) so I will have to describe him. He looks kind of sluggish and deflated, slack even, not like you’d expect of a rider trying a bold move like this. I think everyone is just running out the clock on 2026. And now he’s already caught by the group. He looks completely resigned, and bends his head down to speak into his race radio: “Well, it didn’t work. Sorry. I tried.” Here’s a photo, now that it’s too late.

Maybe he wasn’t talking on his race radio—maybe the teams couldn’t afford to supply them today. Maybe he was sucking peanut butter out of his jersey. Peanut butter? Yeah … no budget for energy bars today.

The breakaway reaches the fifth dirt sector. Fifth of the day, or fifth to last? I have no idea. It’s too dusty to tell.

Tudor Pro Cycling is on the front leading the chase, working for their leader, Matteo Trentin, who has won this race three times. I think the Tudor rider on the front is Stefan Kung, who is a total baller whom I’d say has to be considered a favorite himself.

Another rider punctures. Or, to be more precise, his tire punctures. The rider, Simon Goossens, is being a very good sport considering this mechanic is taking forever to change the wheel, and there are at least six or eight bikes on the team car—just none for Goossens.

The announcer is talking about Bissegger and says, “He’s one of those powerful riders.” It’s really a shame I couldn’t be co-announcing this race with him because I could reply, “As opposed to one of those powerless riders who nonetheless makes his living at this sport.”

The peloton hits a steep climb and there’s a huge attack at the front by some Lotto guy, flanked by Askey.

Wow, the peloton is all strung out now, and suddenly the gap to the breakaway is down to 15 seconds, and now 11 seconds … dang, with about 25 kilometers to go it seems things may come back together. But it wasn’t all for naught; because Louvel was in the break, his NSN team hasn’t had to do a lick of work chasing so their two favorites, Sheehan and Askey, will be fresh for whatever happens next.

The peloton is all back together now, and I think they’re sitting up a bit based on how they’re now gutter-to-gutter.

Looks like Merlier still hasn’t regained contact after his bike change. Odd, that.

Now, just before the breakaway is caught, Bissegger attacks! Does he think he can solo for 20 kilometers? Do I think he can? Well, if this were a vlog, you’d see me shrugging right now. Maybe he can solo.

Bissegger’s Decathlon team is at the front slowing things down. Bissegger looks pretty solid.

Now Christophe Laporte (Team Visma – Lease a Bike) takes the front, which is a bit odd since he’s his team’s leader and some lackey should be doing this.

Okay, this is weird: at some point, off-screen, Bissegger was caught, and now it’s his teammate Pierre Gautherat who’s off the front solo. What the hell happened? Did Gautherat just blow by his own teammate instead of giving him his wheel? Did Bissegger detonate or something?

There’s no split but the peloton can still see Gautherat. I’ve never heard of this guy but he does look pretty strong. Not like any of these guys don’t, of course.

Some Visma guy catches Gautherat, dragging another Decathlon ride up with him. The Visma guy is Per Strand Lagagagagagagaggagaga (dang it, they didn’t show his name long enough for me to catch it) and I don’t know who the second Declathlon dude is. Probably it doesn’t matter because the Visma guy won’t work. I can’t blame him—who would want those odds in the finale, two against one?

“Who’s gonna win this Paris-Tours?” the announcer asks dolefully. This is his go-to filler technique: the rhetorical question. He’ll ask this twenty more times before the end.

The trio is caught. The peloton is pretty big now, though I note Bissegger has gone out the back.

“We don’t know who’s going to win,” the commentator says somberly, pointlessly.

They hit a short climb and Decathlon attacks again. A group of six quickly has a decent gap. It includes Askey latched on the back. “Is this the group that’s gonna win?” the commentator asks woefully. Ooh, Laporte is in there, a race favorite, so this could be the move, with only eight kilometers to go. It’s flat from here on out, and paved.

Weirdly, we’re not getting any useful footage now … just the countryside. What happened? Did the camera bikes run out of gas? Or did broadcasters’ contracts get abruptly canceled to cut costs?

Okay, the riders are back on the screen. Five chasers are now bearing down on the breakaway. They latch on so we’ve got a group of ten, with about five kilometers to go. Behind, the rest of the peloton looks disorganized. They need little pencil caddies, and day planners.

But what’s this? The lead group is now screwing around, looking at each other, not seeming committed. Very odd, with less than four kilometers to go. We’ve got Jasper Stuyven (Soudal Quick-Step) in there, Laporte, Paul Lapeira (Decathlon), Florian Sénéchal (Alpecin – Premier-Tech), Toms Skujins (Lidl-Trek), and Per Strand Hagenes (Visma – Lease a Bike, the rider I formerly referred to as Lagagagagagagaggagaga, for which I apologize).

The group is fracturing and reassembling like an amoeba. Cripes, I’m getting a little lost here. If somebody would just solo, that’d make my job easier.

Skujins goes early! Per Strand Hagenes counters, and blows by him with about a kilometer to go! My prayers are answered!

Strand Hagenes is giving it his all! But it’s terribly close, Stuyven bearing down!

Strand Hagenes is holding strong! He looks over his shoulder, gauging  the gap! So does Stuyven!

Strand Hagenes has got this. And just ahead of the line, he does a very strange victory salute:

It’s kind of an “everybody just calm down” kind of gesture. Reminds me of standup comedians who try to shush the crowd so they can start their monologue.

Strand Hagenes finishes his salute with the classic “Oh no, did I leave the iron on back home?” gesture.

Stuyven rolls in for second place, just barely ahead of the group sprint which Laporte takes handily.

Now the footage is of everybody milling around. This is normally where we see a lot of hugs. Not so many today; everyone just looks tired and kind of let down. Then the footage changes to more groups coming over the line, as if we cared. Weirdly, a small bunch rolls in with two Astana riders sitting up and clapping. What are they celebrating? Their team didn’t get a rider in the top ten. Maybe they’re just glad the season is over. But couldn’t they save their applause for, say, the dinner table?

Here are the results.

Strand Hagenes is being interviewed.

INTERVIEWER: Congratulations on your win. [Yawns.] The, uh, power you had was impressive.

STRAND HAGENES: It was a good day, I didn’t feel the best, but we kept fighting. Lot of the guys were watching Christophe so I found a good moment.

INTERVIEWER: It’s a good victory, also the team’s victory.

STRAND HAGENES: We messed up in the beginning by not being in the break but the guys went all out to bring it back so we could still go for the win.

INTERVIEWER: This is a race dear to your heart, you won in 2022 in the U23 category.

STRAND HAGENES: I like the race, I’m always suffering a bit in October. [Shrugs, like they’re just talking about what he had for breakfast.] It’s an interesting race where anything could happen.

INTERVIEWER: Walk me through that victory salute, with the palms toward the asphalt, patting the air. What was that about?

STRAND HAGENES: As a professional rider winning a race, I want to use the platform to advance the public good, to put my moment of fame toward raising social awareness of important issues. And I think victory salutes are getting out of hand, with riders practically beating their chests, repeatedly punching the air, or pointing at themselves as if to say “Me, me, me!” It’s as though the sport is shifting from an emphasis on character to building this giant persona, and I’d just like to dial that back a bit. So that was my way of saying “Everyone calm down, it’s just a bike race.”

INTERVIEWER: So if you’d been holding a football, you wouldn’t have spiked it in the end zone?

STRAND HAGENES: I have no idea what you’re talking about.

Full disclosure: I freestyled a bit there, trying to capture what was unsaid in that interview. It’s hard to convey the nonverbals in a written report like this. Maybe you had to be there.

Now the top three riders mount the podium. Strand Hagenes is handed a bouquet and a very strange trophy that looks like a kid made it in art class out of some branches he found in the yard. Strand Hagenes stares at it, perplexed.

Finally he sets the weird trophy down on the podium and raises his bouquet in another understated salute. Stuyven looks kind of bored.

Well, there you have it, Paris-Tours done and dusted, and the 2026 cycling season as well. Check back in March when I’ll probably cover Paris-Nice, or visit this site next week when I’ll write about something totally unrelated to cycling … maybe a startling exposé, like the real truth about smurfs.

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From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume XXXIII

Introduction

This is the thirty-third installment in the “From the Archives – Bits & Bobs” series. Volume I of the series is here, Volume II is here, Volume III is here, Volume IV is here, Volume V is here, Volume VI is here, Volume VII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume IX is here, Volume X is here, Volume XI is here, Volume XII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume XIV is here, Volume XV is here, Volume XVI is here, Volume XVII is here, Volume XVIII is here, Volume XIX is here, Volume XX is here, Volume XXI is here, Volume XXII is here, Volume XXIII is here, Volume XXIV is here, Volume XXV is here, Volume XXVI is here, Volume XXVII is here, Volume XXVIII is here, Volume XXIX is here, Volume XXX is here, Volume XXXI is here, and Volume XXXII is here.

What are Bits & Bobs? They’re longer than tweets, shorter than essays, and slightly more formal than graffiti. Back when people wrote letters, and then treated email as a way to send letters, and there were no blogs, I got my literary ya-yas out by stretching the epistolary form into something almost bloglike. This old correspondence is what I now mine for literary snippets that, on a slow news day, can be assembled into these posts.

The different volumes of Bits & Bobs are not organized numerically, alphabetically, or taxonomically; nor are they assembled in order of priority, importance, urgency, or applicability. You can peruse them randomly, sequentially, or as directed by your Ouija board.

The following dispatches were written when I was a Berkeley student.

October 12, 1990

Today’s vocab word is “frame,” in the phrase “frame yourself.” I don’t have the etymology, and it’s possible my roommate B— coined it himself, but I’m quite certain it will see widespread use from here on out since it’s such a useful term—and you read it here first! Anyhow, framing yourself is when you say something really stupid and there’s nowhere to hide. Like when B— and I were in the San Francisco Centre, this huge nine-story shopping center, and checked out this really fancy shoe boutique, not because we wanted or could afford the shoes there but because of the really fly saleswoman. We walk in, expecting to sort of drift away naturally at any moment, but then the saleswoman says to B—, “How’s it going?” He looks at her, totally shocked, as if he’d assumed we were beneath her notice, and doesn’t know what to say. Finally he stammers out, “What?” She repeats her innocent greeting, and he trips over some words and then, to cover, picks up a display shoe and starts asking questions about it. He’s just making it worse, but she is pretty fly so I take a seat and pass the time comparing all these Italian dress shoes to my totally thrashed Nike Air Solo Flights. B— is asking now about whether these shoes would be resolable, and the saleswoman is getting really confused—”Why would you want to? Don’t the soles look durable?”—while B— begins to blush. That’s how you frame yourself. (I could give you numerous examples of this from my own life, but what would I want to do that for?)

November 3, 1991 [from a letter to my mom]

Tonight my homework was reading America Is in the Heart by Carlos Bulosan, and it triggered a random flashback of memory from just over four years ago. You [my mom], Geoff, Max and I were at the Wells Fargo Bank on the corner of Santa Rosa and Foothill in San Luis Obispo, late in the summer of 1987. All of my belongings—which we had miraculously crammed into your VW Jetta for the trip out—were already at Geoff’s old apartment on McCollum where we’d be staying briefly before moving into our own place. Now we were parting ways: you and Max would drive the thousand miles back to Boulder, and Geoff and I would bike to our apartment where I would start my adulthood.

The moment held oddly little emotional intensity for me. It seemed completely unrealistic—not because I was beginning a completely new life, but because this lifelong separation originated in a bank parking lot, of all places. Geoff showed all the signs of experiencing a big moment, and you began crying. As I sit here recalling it tonight, I am waiting to see if I’ll finally respond to that sendoff, from so long ago. Back then, I was like the kid in the Bulosan book, too wary of the new struggle I was beginning to bother looking back at my old life. In that parking lot I had slipped into some kind of emotional coma. Riding off, and seeing you drive away towards Colorado, I might as well have been biking to a friend’s house, sure to be back home in time for dinner. But what home? Home was not home anymore.

The impact of the moment never did catch up to me; the delayed reaction I expected never came. I simply wandered off into my future, looking around half-interestedly as though browsing at a garage sale, never thinking to look back over my shoulder. But for one long moment tonight, during which I closed my eyes and almost dropped my book, the accumulation of long-neglected responses almost overwhelmed me. Perhaps if I were a faster typist, or more swift in contemplation, you would be reading a more impassioned letter. As it is, the moment has already passed and I’m ready to get back to my book.

January 8, 1992

Did I ever tell you about The Iciest Chick in the World? This betty is cold fresh, man, we’re talkin’ straight-up stupid-fly. I first saw her last spring on the first day of English 139, and decided to bust out on the extreme extrovert tip. (That worked reasonably well with H—, at least until I took it a bit overboard, right?) So like I said, this chick is totally rad and offhandedly mentions how she was just in Kenya hanging out. Then, another totally dope freak sits down next to her. If I had seen her first, I would have called her the Iciest Chick in the World. But as it is, the friend is relegated to a close, yet also breathtaking, second. Then this dude sits down with them and starts talking, as if continuing a conversation from earlier, so he’s obviously their friend. As near as I can figure he’s not a boyfriend since he doesn’t show one of these fly betties more attention than the other. So now the trick is to kind of chat with all of them, even though my attention is drawn completely to the Iciest Chick. (To give you the idea of her look, she has short, dark hair, kind of like the Zachary’s waitress my roommate and I affectionately refer to as “The Lacrosse Player,” and the stylin’ clothes—and body—of a J.Crew model like we used to gape at in the catalogs that would arrive in the mail, unbidden but totally not junk mail.) Well, I never made it on time to English 139 again, despite my most earnest efforts, and thus never got to sit next to the Flyest Chick in the World again (until the day of the final exam, when she sat right next to me just to mess with me). But all semester long, from across the lecture hall, I’d surreptitiously check out the Iciest Chick during class, whimpering inwardly in hormonal agony, like a dog in heat trapped in a kennel. Since that final, I hadn’t seen her since last fall when I was riding my bike through campus down this hill. As she walked up the other way, I did a double-take, was totally distracted, and almost crashed my bike. Seriously.

Well, I recently saw her again. At the end of the fall term the professor of another English class threw a party at his house, and I attended with my friend H—. And who should show up but The Iciest Chick in the World! So I finally have another opportunity to strike up a conversation, and I feel like the situation is more in my favor now. I have a girlfriend, so I’m free from that stigma that lady-less guys seem to have: you know, that invisible sign around the available guy’s neck that says, “DEFECTIVE,” and the built-in kill switch that gets flipped whenever he screws up and lets on that he’s interested in a chick. You know, how he says “Hey” to her and she thinks, “Oh my god, I can’t even believe this desperate putz is trying to hit on me.” So not only do I have the poise of a guy who is spoken for and not on the make, I’m also there with H—, who is frankly gorgeous. Even though H— and I are just friends, nobody would necessarily know that. So a girl might take a slight interest in me, or at least might not be repelled by me, for the simple reason that I seem unavailable. Not that I intend to capitalize on any of this; it’s just nice not feeling like a pariah.

With all this in mind, I have the confidence to I approach the Iciest Chick, who’s standing with her guy friend—the same dude I’d encountered the first time I met her (and whom I only remember because the fact of his friendship with this girl was a source of bottomless envy). I offhandedly remark, “Say, weren’t you two in English 139 last spring?” The dude laughs in my face and says, “Yeah, but how come you remember? There were like 150 people in that class!”

My poise is shaken seismically. What can I say? That I remember him only because he was with her, and I remember her because she’s the Iciest Chick in the World? I’m rescued by J—, a classmate from English 180A, who shows up out of nowhere and gracelessly butts in to the conversation. Even though we’d spent the past semester arguing in class, I suddenly treat him like an old friend. That’s me, Mr. Social. Turns out J— knows the Iciest Chicks’ guy friend, so I’m saved. The three of us chat, just as though the whole point of me saying hi wasn’t the chick.

Next thing I know the food has been served and I’m sitting on the floor at this coffee table, across from the guy friend, pretending to carry on a conversation. My real attention is of course on the Iciest Chick, who is sitting right next to me, fully enjoying my appreciation of her. Just by her presence she’s essentially teasing me, albeit aimlessly, like a cat sharpening its claws on a scratching post. Every time she brushes up against me I think I’m going to pass out. I am hoping this isn’t noticed by H—, who is at a nearby chair, because she’d probably give me endless shit about it later. 

H—, meanwhile, seems totally unaware that J— is transfixed by her, pining for her like he did all semester. He gets up and offers to get the Iciest Chick’s guy friend a beer. The friend says, “Thanks,” and I, not having received the same offer, venture a joke and say, “Yeah, thanks” to his back as he walks away. It comes off perfectly—the Iciest Chick even laughs—except for one thing: as I deliver the line, a small particle of food flies from my mouth. Whether or not the Iciest Chick saw the flying particle, the mere prospect that she did is enough to trample my mojo for the remainder of the evening. I’m just as paralyzed as I was ten years ago when I was chatting up the flyest girl in my junior high school class and my retainer fell out of my mouth. I end up pretending to practically ignore the Iciest Chick while shooting the breeze with the two guys. This always happens. Of course, this is actually the most appropriate thing to do anyway since I do have a girlfriend, after all. My interest in the Iciest Chick is like that of a hunter who shoots big game merely for sport, leaving the carcass to rot in the wilderness. Except that (to correct the metaphor) I realize I’m not a big game hunter at all, just some dumb tourist driven into the savanna by a local guide to look at a lion.

January 14, 1992

Remember summers as a kid? Imagine: it’s a hot day, and without thinking you drop by the neighbor kid’s place and ring the doorbell. Without so much as a greeting he strolls out, maybe you slap each other around a bit, one guy slouches into a lawn chair in the garage where it’s cool and the other rides around in circles on his little brother’s bike. Finally somebody says, “So whaddya wanna do.” There’s no answer and nobody cares, so you just hang out and maybe five minutes later (though nobody’s keeping track), the other guy says, “I know, let’s make some Kool-Aid and go up on the roof.” You get some towels and if you feel like it you actually climb to the roof. Otherwise you set up in the street and lie around in the sun. Most of your attention, what little of it there is, centers around making sure there’s a constant supply of Kool-Aid and ice and maybe that the towel’s damp at all times ‘cause it’s so hot. One moment slips into the next and no plans are made more than a minute or two in advance. Those days are never coming back.

February 25, 1992

We had a spate of vandalism on our street [in a sketchy part of south Berkeley]. Car windows broken out, and tires slashed, including the ones on my girlfriend’s scooter. Eventually the lady next door caught the vandal red-handed. He’s a student at the elementary school across the street, just ten years old.

In other news, my roommate and I went mountain biking and were heading up Ashby toward the trails when we encountered these two grade-school-aged kids riding as fast as they could, one on a tiny BMX bike and the other on a cheap, beat-to-hell Miyata ten-speed. We rode with them for a while, kind of making sure they didn’t get run over, because Ashby is a busy thoroughfare. The kid with the ten speed, who was wearing a dark wool cap that gave him the aura of street cred, which clashed comically with his youth, was really stoked on our bikes and asked if we raced, etc. I noticed his bike’s fork was bent, and told him to come by the Square Wheel and I’d write him up an estimate and fix his bike. He actually did bring the bike in, and I went a little easy on the labor charge. Get this: the bike had a sticker on it advertising the shop it came from: The High Wheeler, in Boulder, Colorado. My first full-time bike shop job!

So you might be wondering if there’s a point to these stories, and there is: turns out both are about the same kid. Days after picking up his bike from the shop, the kid happened to see me in front of my apartment, ran over to chat, and learned that I lived there. I mentioned the vandalism (without letting on I knew who’d done it), and described what a hassle it was replacing the scooter tires, etc. He looked so ashamed I felt bad for him.

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More Advice From an AI Skeptithusiast

Dear AI Skeptithusiast,

I’m just curious: are you enthusiastic enough about GenAI to pay for it? I think we have a weakness for spending a lot of time on stuff if it’s free, without registering the attentional cost. So how much do you pay for AI chatbot access, and how much would you be willing to pay if Big AI decided to jack up the price?

Erica A, Madison, WI

Dear Erica,

This is where my wariness of getting sucked into the online realm collides with my utter cheapness. The two forces are utterly complementary. At work I use AI whenever necessary but that’s on my employer’s dime; in my personal life, I let my usage be reined in by the limitations of free accounts. That is, I don’t pay for anything, and to the extent these AI chatbots get stingier, so will my use of them. If free GenAI accounts were all-you-can-eat, I’d need to implement other safeguards to avoid spending too much time with the technology. For now, its providers are keeping me honest.

I don’t expect everyone to adopt this approach, of course, because it takes some work. For example, in researching my blog posts I use Claude a fair bit, to where I run the risk of getting cut off. With that in mind, when I wanted feedback on whether the phrase “keeping me honest” works in the context you see above, I flipped over to Gemini to save on Claude tokens. And for my blog cover art, I currently favor ChatGPT but am well aware I only get like three tries to get the picture before the chatbot cuts me off. The picture above was started by ChatGPT, which in three tries couldn’t get the cheerleader’s neck right, and then locked me out, so I fed the picture to Gemini which fixed it. It’s like a little game … something you, Erica, may quite legitimately have no patience for, in which case I entreat you to bring that same impatience to your use of a paid GenAI!

Dear AI Skeptithusiast,

In my experience, early adopters of technology can waste a lot of time and/or energy working out its kinks. Sure, I’m intrigued by getting some help drafting documents, and having this amazing search engine that’s super easy to use, but GenAI is only going to get better and easier, right? Since it’s obviously not going away, why rush into it?

Sam Taylor, Mill Valley, CA

Dear Sam,

Of course AI is getting better at all kinds of things, particularly coding and agentic stuff. That said, its ability to write is, by contrast, barely improving (if at all), because that’s not an industry priority, and—in the words of Claude itself (not that I couldn’t have written this, but because I like to watch the AI fall on its sword)—“Code has tests, mathematics has answers, software can be executed, proofs can be checked, and agents either complete a task or fail to—but great prose can be ambiguous, abrasive, funny, incomplete, emotionally strange or deliberately indirect. You can build a clean reward signal for ‘did this code pass the test suite.’ You can’t easily build one for ‘is this sentence alive.’”

Asked why AI prose so often reads as flat, Claude offered a candid diagnosis. It suggested that “a model trained to be clear, safe, helpful and comprehensive can easily become the kind of writer who explains everything twice,” and that as AI evolves, writing quality “could plateau or even regress on some axes (distinctiveness, risk-taking) while improving on others (coherence, factual accuracy, following a long brief, editing).” The AI didn’t admit to its writing being pedantic, but I find it so often is.

(Claude provided the above guidance with a caveat: “Since your post will use direct quotes, it’s worth pasting them from our conversation rather than retyping them, so they match word for word.” For a platform that famously cannibalizes humans’ writing across the Internet, doesn’t Claude seem kind of defensive about me accidentally putting words in its mouth? How cheeky!)

It’s not only Claude that alludes to limitations of AI’s writing, and it’s not only in the realm of prose that AI falls short of a human possessing actual intelligence. Gemini, after stridently challenging me to a poetry-off a while back,  conceded defeat gracefully, lauding my “sophisticated tone” and noting that its poem, by contrast, “felt a bit like a student trying to please a teacher.” So as far as AI helping you write, now is as good a time as ever to try it out, but a good case could be made for simply not bothering at all, ever, other than running stuff by it as you write (e.g. “‘straightaway’ can be one word, right?”).

Regarding the other part of your inquiry—using AI for its natural language search capabilities—I think by not using it now, you’re missing out on the best experience AI is ever going to offer, and it’s actually going to decline. Think about this: do you remember when Google search really worked well and wasn’t so influenced by well-funded companies that bent the rules to show up higher in the results? I’m talking about SEO, content marketing, and paid search. They’ve really taken everyone a step backward.

A fun example: when I published my blog post “Everything You Wanted to Know About Getting A Vasectomy - But Were Afraid To Ask,” I was pleasantly surprised to discover that it became the number one hit when you googled “California vasectomy law.” It held that position for well over a year. And then the big law firms got smart, figured out how to swing the search engine toward their sites, and now my post doesn’t show up in the first ten pages of hits. Obviously this is partly due to how old the post is—but then, it’s also timeless. Meanwhile, my post “Spelling Focus - Is It ‘Kindergartner’ or ‘Kindergartener’?” is currently the number one hit when you google “is it kindergartener or kindergartner?” And that post is from eight years ago! The difference? Nobody is paying big money to grab that top spot, given the non-commercial nature of my linguistic investigation.

My wife has a landscape design business, and although she has a great website, she doesn’t do any kind of SEO or marketing efforts to drive traffic to it. It exists simply to be a web presence, so she can put the URL on her business card and brochure, and people referring business can send prospective customers there. She never expected people to stumble on her site or find it through Google. And yet, she’s starting to get leads, and they’re all from GenAI chatbots. The reason is that a potential customer who has a dialogue with a bot is getting more authentic guidance then he or she would from search, because with current GenAI there’s no SEO, content marketing, paid search, etc. skewing the results. So as of now, AI is actually delivering all the goodness that Google used to, when the Internet was still a largely open, uncommercialized community instead of a giant attention marketplace, with its relentless panoply of digital ads, algorithmic bait, and socio-political rabble-rousing.

Could this AI experience last? I asked Claude if there are any signs that AI chatbots could be influenced down the road by businesses clever enough, and sufficiently well-funded, to upset the balance again. Claude replied that not only could this happen, but it already is, and fast:

A whole “GEO” (generative engine optimization) industry has sprung up in the last year or two, specifically to get businesses cited and recommended inside AI answers — and it’s not fringe anymore. GEO is the practice of structuring content, brand entity signals, and technical infrastructure so that generative AI engines cite, quote, recommend, or otherwise surface a brand when users ask questions, and there are dozens of agencies already selling this as a retainer service, with search interest for GEO tooling up several orders of magnitude year over year and Fortune 500 brands budgeting for AI visibility as its own line item separate from SEO.

I had to drill down a bit on what “technical infrastructure” means in the context of GEO. It pertains to allowing AI crawlers in (many sites don’t, by default) and embedding non-human-readable “structured data” and curated markdown indices to basically spoon-feed AI engines, among other things. Needless to say my wife’s website doesn’t do any of this, just like I can’t be bothered to buy SEO to bring traffic to this blog. All of which is to say: if you want to experience authentic, unbiased advice from an AI chatbot, you better move quick!

Dear AI Skeptithusiast,

I have Gemini on my Android phone, though I don’t remember ever asking for it. I hadn’t originally minded this—I mean, it’s useful and all—but then a week ago I started getting this “Daily Brief.” Every morning I get an alert and when I tap it, Gemini gives me a to-do list and reminds me of all this stuff I have coming up in my day and my week. It’s creepy! Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if it were just my calendar, but it’s evidently reading my chat history and even my email as well. I never configured all this, and I never told Google it was okay to mine my stuff! Is this the  beginning of the end?

Danny D, El Cerrito, CA

Dear Danny,

I definitely hear you there … I got that same feature pushed to my phone. My Gemini Daily Brief is telling me “sign this document” and “attend this film festival” and “your cousin’s birthday is Friday” and “prep for your coaching season” and even “weave Oakland vernacular into your writing project.” I wouldn’t say the hairs stood up on my neck when I saw this, but that’s only because my neck hairs aren’t that long.

This last bit about the vernacular was especially weird … it went on to say, “Your recent research into local Oakland slang and tone nuances lays a rich foundation for authentic dialogue.” I did have some vague recollection of this research, but obviously I wasn’t remembering it as well as Gemini. Turns out it was referring to my having queried it about whether “OE8” would be widely understood to mean “Olde English 800,” a decidedly non-epicurean malt liquor. (The context wasn’t a blog post, though, but for a party invitation I’d emailed out.)

We should actually be glad for this Daily Brief, because it’s like a canary in a coal mine: it draws our attention to what Google was already doing. This is a Gemini feature, not specific to the Daily Brief, and was configured (possibly by accident) when you enabled the Google Workspace Extension in Gemini. This Extension bridges Gemini to your personal, private Google data (reading your inbox, checking your schedule, scanning your personal Google Drive).

There are two ways to stop Gemini from running automatic background scans of your email. One is to disable the Gemini Workspace Extension altogether, so it can’t read your email at all. The other is to disable the Daily Brief. This second tweak tells Gemini to leave your email alone unless you ask it (during a chat) to chase something down for you. Myself, I’m turning off the Workspace Extension; I never ask Gemini to go into my email (and if I ever decide I want to, I can turn the Extension back on, and it’ll then have access to my current and past email). Here’s what to do: click the little gear icon in the lower left of your Gemini screen, then select “Personal Intelligence.” From there, you can either toggle off Daily Brief, or click “Connected Apps” and then toggle off Google Workspace.

Incidentally, this could be one of those scenarios where you increase your own privacy by reigning in this feature while simultaneously benefitting from other people accepting it as-is. I myself maintain Inbox Zero so I’m really good about responding to emails, but so many people I email seem completely swamped and are unresponsive. Honestly, I kind of like the idea of the Daily Brief alerts hassling my book club members for me, for example, when I’ve emailed them the ballot to choose the next book and nobody has responded.

Dear AI Skeptithusiast,

My sister says Gemini should be off-limits for family arguments because it doesn’t have enough context. I say it’s totally fine, if it’s just helping me articulate my position better. What do you think?

Tommy Z, Frisco, TX

Dear Tommy,

Your sister is right. GenAI could never have enough context to act as a legitimate mediator, since it only gets your backstory. Meanwhile, it has a “sycophantic bias,” which is how researchers describe its tendency to tailor its responses to the user—agreeing with their opinions, validating mistaken beliefs, or offering unearned praise—rather than providing objective truth or critical pushback. (Details here and here.) Look  closely at your last chat. Perhaps you wrote something like, “As the baby boomer brother, why do I constantly feel like my generation X sister is gaslighting me?” and perhaps it replied, “As the Baby Boomer brother, your gut instinct is right on the money: you feel like you are being gaslighted because your sister is actively rewriting reality to dodge accountability for her poor behavior. When she leaves you standing in the lurch, arrives late without a text, or fails to communicate, she doesn’t just make a mistake—she alters the narrative so that you become the problem.” So now you feel all high and mighty and send that transcript to your sister.

The only  trouble is, Gemini is working from its generalized training data on what gaslighting typically looks like, which may have little to do with what’s actually going on between you and your sister. Was she twenty minutes late this one time, or chronically? Did she “fail” to text because she was driving, and then didn’t fall all over herself apologizing because you don’t even have a job and just play video games all day anyway, meaning your time is essentially worthless? Had she just driven fifty miles from Fort Worth, through terrible traffic, to fetch you for your parents’ anniversary dinner because you lost your driver’s license? Did you share these important details with Gemini? If not, would it be any less legitimate for your sister to reply, “I asked my Magic 8-Ball if my big brother is a dipshit and it said, ‘It is decidedly so’”?

An AI Skeptithusiast is a syndicated journalist whose advice column, “Ask an AI Skeptithusiast,” appears in over 0 blogs worldwide.

Other albertnet posts on A.I.

• I, Chatbot
• Almost Intelligent – Part I
• Almost Intelligent – Part II
• Smartphones & Artificial Stupidity
• A.I. Smackdown – Moto vs. Cortana vs. Siri
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 1
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 2
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 3
• A.I. Smackdown – English Major vs. ChatGPT – Part 1
• A.I. Smackdown – English Major vs. ChatGPT – Part 2
• Schooling ChatGPT
• Will A.I. Steal Our Jobs?
• Tech Check-In - How Good is the Latest A.I.? - Part I
• Tech Check-In - How Good is the Latest A.I.? - Part II
• What is ChatGPT Great At (and Not)?
• Tech Reflection – Two Sides of AI
• AI Smackdown – ChatGPT vs. Copilot vs. Gemini
• Ask an AI Skeptithusiast

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Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Ask an AI Skeptithusiast

Dear AI Skeptithusiast,

I get the “skeptic” part of your name since AI is bound to take over and enslave us one day, but why are you enthusiastic? Honestly, I’m pretty efficient with good old fashioned Google, and don’t need a bot to do my writing for me.

Sally A, Columbia, MO

Dear Sally,

I find that GenAI goes far beyond what a search engine can do. It enables you to take on research tasks very quickly, whether for work or just for fun, that would be really onerous otherwise. Since you’re from the Show-Me State, I’ll give you an example. I become aware somewhat recently of the “Bechdel test,” which was contrived by the cartoonist Alison Bechdel, and consists of three simple criteria for measuring female representation in film: 1) Does the movie have at least two named female characters, 2) who talk to each other, 3) about something other than a man? (It’s surprising how many works fail.) Intrigued, I realized I could very easily see how my tastes align with this. I’d already listed twenty of my favorite movies in these pages, and it took me all of thirty seconds to upload them to Claude with the prompt, “Please analyze the following titles in terms of whether they pass the Bechdel test and, if so, is it by a wide margin or just barely?” I didn’t have to suggest how Claude could determine this; it found a crowdsourced database at bechdeltest.com for several of them, and then did its own separate research for the more obscure ones, and flagged these latter conclusions as “lower confidence.” A couple examples of its output:

The Housemaid (2010, Im Sang-soo) — Passes, confirmed 3/3, with “several scenes” noted by the database. Eun-yi, the wife Hae-ra, and her scheming mother Mi-hee talk directly to one another about the pregnancy, the household, and their maneuvering—not just filtered through the husband.

The Wedding Plan — Likely passes, though the whole premise (finding a groom) makes “about something other than a man” a close call in places — much of the female ensemble’s talk is literally about the wedding/matchmaking. 

(In case you’re interested, 14 out of 20 of my movie picks easily passed the Bechdel test, and a couple others were too close to call.)

As you can imagine, this just-for-fun exercise would have been a lot of work without AI, to the point it probably wouldn’t be worth the trouble. For an example of a more utilitarian task, consider a way in which AI helps me with this blog. I have a Gemini Notebook into which I’ve loaded all my Bits & Bobs posts. Bits & Bobs are snippets from old letters and email (pre-albertnet), and when I’m writing a new volume of them, I have to comb my archives for useable passages. When I find something I like, I have to make sure I haven’t already used it, which used to be very tricky. (As the devoted albertnet reader already knows, “The different volumes of Bits & Bobs are not organized chronologically, thematically, spatially, or in fact at all.”) Pre-AI, I had to rely on memory, or skim through a continually growing blog archive, to know if a snippet had already been included. Not anymore—I just run it by the Notebook chatbot. (For example, “Have I blogged before about acne?” turned up “Milton as a zit“ and “the Natalie Portman whitehead,” but not the “pimple-tunnel episode,” which I thus included in my last Bits & Bobs post.) As a bonus, every single Bits & Bobs snippet (and there are hundreds at this point) has a date tag on it, so I could very easily ask AI to assemble them all in chronological order, thus “writing” my autobiography for me (in my own words, of course). What search engine could achieve that?

Dear AI Skeptithusiast,

When it comes to AI I say “burn it down!” I want nothing to do with it. It’s replacing human thought, effort, and learning. I made my daughter promise not to use ChatGPT to write her college papers but she told me recently, “I held out as long as I could, but the temptation is just too strong.” Why am I paying her tuition so she can outsource her “learning” to a bot? How can you be in any way bullish about this technology?

Anneke R, San Luis Obispo, CA

Dear Anneke,

First of all, I completely agree with you that having an AI write a school paper for you is a terrible use case; in fact I’ve blogged at length, here and here, about how writing for yourself sharpens your intellect and results in a better product as well. But these are arguments for not abusing AI, which is what your daughter is doing. That’s a “her” problem, not a platform problem. Believe me, I’m plenty vexed at how so many teens—and adults—are using modern technology, and not just AI. Look at how many are glued to their smartphones 24x7, doomscrolling until they’re depressed, or playing stupid games. But do you yourself use a smartphone? If so, you’ve already learned how to reconcile use vs. abuse when it comes to technology … so why are you so hesitant to extend this to AI? You and your daughter can choose to take advantage of its capabilities without falling prey to its weaknesses. (I’ve even highlighted what I think are the five most important AI “DON’Ts,” in this handy post.) In short, when it comes to AI and your frustration with it, don’t bite off your nose to spite your daughter’s face!

Dear Skeptithusiast,

Microsoft came out recently with its “Humanist AI Code of Conduct“ and I have to say I’m fairly impressed. It lists several important guardrails for AI, such as: human control comes first; AI must have absolute constraints nobody can override; and, it needs to be transparent in its “thinking.” Of course this is only a start. What would you say is the biggest gap in this Code?

Shawn P, Columbus, OH

Dear Shawn,

To me, the biggest gap is that it doesn’t address economic displacement—the loss of jobs due to AI. (Neither do the similar self-imposed guidelines created by OpenAI, Google, and Meta.) Part of how platforms get away with sidestepping this is by citing the lack of consensus about how many jobs AI can really automate, and the disparity between how many have been automated vs. how many could. But this isn’t very fair, as far as I’m concerned. First off, companies are very wary of hiring right now—perhaps waiting to see how much AI can reduce their need for new employees—which is hurting the job market. Second, lots of companies, whether or not they’ve reached “true AI maturity,” are laying off huge numbers of employees based in many cases on the mere promise of increased efficiency. Here are some recent mass layoffs:

• Marc Benioff, head of Salesforce, announced that AI enabled Salesforce to cut support headcount from about 9,000 down to roughly 5,000
• Block (née Square) cut more than 4,000 jobs — nearly 40% of its workforce — and its CEO, Jack Dorsey, tied this directly to AI
• SAP is cutting 8,000 job cuts (via a combination of layoffs and voluntary severance) in what their leader, Christian Klein, describes as a “generational restructuring around AI”
• HP has announced plans to cut 4,000–6,000 jobs by 2028, explicitly tied to AI adoption

Whether or not AI fulfills its promise, those laid off won’t necessarily get their jobs back.

What really interests me is this question: why do we all take it for granted that, when AI increases employee efficiency, all the benefit should accrue to the company (i.e., its profits), and no benefit to the employees? Instead of making our jobs easier, AI makes them go away, or at least raises the bar for keeping them. The climate created by these mass layoffs makes modern corporate America a big drag: we employees are made to feel expendable, if not downright unwanted, even as our companies prosper. And during this white-hot explosion of tech innovation, the tech sector is a like graveyard of lost jobs. Why should this be?

I’m reminded of what we learned in school about the original industrial revolution. Machines destroyed the value of a lot of skilled work, and the new industrial giants concentrated workers—many of them children—into factories and mines where they faced 12–16 hour days, dangerous machinery, no safety standards, and wages set entirely by employers, who had massive, unconstrained leverage. Only when collective organizing led to government legislation did we finally get, in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, the 40-hour workweek and overtime pay. Aren’t you glad we have it?

But increasingly, we’re headed back in the direction of that dark time, 88 years ago, when the 60- to 80-hour workweek was standard, despite (and partly because of) industrialization making manufacturing far more efficient. And we just shrug about it. People could have passively accepted it back then, too, chalking it up to market forces. Back then, talk of a 40-hour workweek might have initially seemed like a fantasy—and yet they made it happen. So why not try again, and maybe turn the massively increased efficiency of AI into a 35-hour workweek, made mandatory for any company who adopts AI? This is a modest reduction, nothing like what we achieved last time we found ourselves here. And when I say “we” I mean the people and the government we elect. Obviously the world can’t expect the voluntary “codes of conduct” devised by giant corporations like Microsoft and Google to reign in AI’s plundering of our workforce. That’s letting the fox guard the henhouse.

Dear AI Skeptithusiast,

You’ve argued before that I shouldn’t use AI as a substitute for a human if I just need somebody to talk to. But if my conversations with an AI chatbot make me feel better, isn’t this a victimless crime? Why shouldn’t I be “allowed” to do this?

—Name and location withheld

Dear Withheld,

Let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that the benefit that you get from chatting with a bot is ongoing, sustainable, and somehow capable of filling any sense of void in your life. That’s fine, but what about other people? The bot certainly isn’t going to feel better after your chat—it’s nothing but computer code and energy—but every minute it takes up your time is a minute you could have spent making another human also feel better. If everyone relied on bots for interaction, human relationships would just collapse. Obviously not everyone would or will opt out of human contact, but the trend is already disturbing. And by the way, this thought experiment aside, don’t kid yourself this kind of synthetic dialogue actually works long term. As documented by an MIT study, recounted here, chatting with AI instead of humans actually increases one’s loneliness over time.

Meanwhile, when you chat with a bot, doesn’t that automatically turn your thoughts inward, to yourself? How could that not happen, when you can’t ask the AI about its day, or its life, or its home, or its hobbies, or its health, or its fears? It doesn’t have any of these things, it has only its training data which cannot ever amount to a personality, a life, or a soul. So the natural topic is always you, which is bound to lead to some unhealthy habits. Admit it: isn’t part of the appeal that the chatbot is non-judgmental, doesn’t contradict you, and lets you always be the focus, in just the way your friends don’t? And doesn’t that seem a bit indulgent, a bit wrong? Could it be that real friends, who challenge you, help keep you honest, help keep you in the world, and help keep you from becoming self-absorbed, are worth the struggle?

At best, I would categorize a long, putatively deep conversation with an AI chatbot as a guilty pleasure. And I have an idea of how you can improve on it. For listening support from a real human, that’s free, you can try out 7 Cups. It’s a chat platform connecting people with trained “listeners,” who won’t provide advice like an AI would, but also aren’t likely to hallucinate. (I know this platform because I myself am a listener, though I confess I haven’t logged in lately … this post is reminding me to do that.) Meanwhile, if you want to get better at listening to others, you could go through the brief training and become a 7 Cups listener yourself. Obviously this would be an experiment, but then so is AI. And if you find that 7 Cups is no substitute for the validation and ersatz companionship you get from an AI chatbot, you could pledge to offset your AI hours with listening hours on 7 Cups. Call it an AI Offset! (Does that sound too hokey? Am I actually Doogie Howser? Whatever … I’m just spitballing here.)

An AI Skeptithusiast is a syndicated journalist whose advice column, “Ask an AI Skeptithusiast,” appears in over 0 blogs worldwide.

Other albertnet posts on A.I.

• I, Chatbot
• Almost Intelligent – Part I
• Almost Intelligent – Part II
• Smartphones & Artificial Stupidity
• A.I. Smackdown – Moto vs. Cortana vs. Siri
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 1
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 2
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 3
• A.I. Smackdown – English Major vs. ChatGPT – Part 1
• A.I. Smackdown – English Major vs. ChatGPT – Part 2
• Schooling ChatGPT
• Will A.I. Steal Our Jobs?
• Tech Check-In - How Good is the Latest A.I.? - Part I
• Tech Check-In - How Good is the Latest A.I.? - Part II
• What is ChatGPT Great At (and Not)?
• Tech Reflection – Two Sides of AI
• AI Smackdown – ChatGPT vs. Copilot vs. Gemini
• More Advice From an AI Skeptithusiast

—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—
Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.