Met a guy at a bus stop in Cleveland who totally changed how I spot bots

I was waiting for the 26 bus near Public Square last Tuesday when this older guy starts talking to me about the weather. He sounded normal at first but then he started listing off exactly how many inches of rain we got each month for the past year. Like down to the decimal. No one off the top of their head knows that. I pulled up my phone and checked the NOAA site and he was dead on for every month. Later I found out he was a retired meteorologist but for those 10 minutes I was convinced he was some AI voice test gone wrong. Have you ever had someone drop hyper specific stats like that in casual conversation and just wonder what they actually are?

3 comments

3 Comments

jenny_lane124d ago

Honestly, doesn't it feel like everyone's walking around with some hidden expertise now? Like we're all just NPCs in someone else's random side quest. Tbh I've started noticing people rattle off weirdly specific stuff all the time and it kinda makes me wonder what other secret databases they're sitting on.

charlies374d ago

Hold up though, those NOAA numbers online are actually preliminary and can get revised later on, so he might've been slightly off and you wouldn't have even known.

violag804d ago

Oh man, that's a good point actually. I had a friend who got all worked up about a heat record being broken last summer, went on and on about how it proved everything was getting worse. Then like a month later the number got revised down by like 2 degrees and it wasn't even a record anymore. He was so embarrassed he deleted the whole thread. Idk, it's easy to jump on stuff too fast when it fits what you already think.