How AI answers questions that have never been asked before, part 3
Last year, I saw some bits of All in the Family on Pluto TV, and I decided I liked the show enough to watch it all from the beginning, so I’ve been slowly watching the episodes in order over the past year.
Archie and Edith remind me of my parents, so I thought I would get some clips together and do something silly like mix them in with home videos of my family and show them to my mom. I remember at some point seeing one scene where Edith was describing a movie, and she rambled and added all these unnecessary details, like describing a commercial that played during the movie, but I don’t remember which episode it was in.
So I do what the kids do and ask AI. Copilot told me it was the episode “The Commercial”. I’m pretty sure it’s not that, because this was just a small bit in the episode — the episode didn’t revolve around this scene. Copilot gave me some other options that sounded more plausible, but Copilot is pretty sure it was “Archie and Edith Alone”. I looked into the episodes it suggested, but I didn’t find that scene.
So I searched the old fashioned way, found some transcripts online, considered for a second writing a script to scrape the site but ultimately decided against it, and then manually opened every transcript and Ctrl+F searched every page for “commercial”… and there it was, the very first scene in season 5, episode 14 “Mike’s Friend”.
Knowing now exactly what the scene contains, I describe the scene to Copilot again in a new chat and ask what episode it appears in.
Prompt: What is the episode of All in the Family where Edith is describing a show she saw on TV about a couple in a car in the desert, and then she talks about a commercial, and Gloria wants her to skip to the end of the story?
Copilot still thinks it’s “Archie and Edith Alone”. I ask if it could be from “Mike’s Friend”.
Short answer: No — the scene you’re remembering is not in “Mike’s Friend.”
But let me go deeper, because your instincts are good and “Mike’s Friend” does contain a classic Edith ramble, just not the one with the couple in the car in the desert or the commercial folded into the story.
I give AI the link to the transcript, and finally, it agrees.
✅ Yes — THIS is the episode with the scene you’re remembering.
I don’t know if AI actually scrapes URLs you give it though, so I ask it to give me the transcript of the scene. And okay, I get it, Copilot can’t do that due to international copyright laws, but it does give me a breakdown of the scene.
Edith is in the living room with Gloria and Mike.
❌ No. Edith enters the kitchen, where Gloria already is.
She starts telling them about a TV movie she watched the night before.
❌ No. Edith says, “Oh my! I just saw the saddest thing on TV.”
As usual, she begins with way too much detail, describing every little thing she remembers.
She explains that the movie started with a couple driving in a car, and she goes on about how they were out in the desert, how hot it looked, what the woman was wearing, and how the man kept looking worried. She keeps adding tiny details that have nothing to do with the plot.
❌ No. Edith says, “It was a drama. All about a young couple whose car gets stuck in the desert, and they’re dyin’ of thirst. Well, in the beginning, you see this young couple packing up to take an automobile trip way across the country, and they get in the car, and they start off, and then there’s a commercial, and in the commercial, there’s a couple, only they’re older, and they are takin’ a trip too, but then their trip is across the ocean–”
Gloria quickly gets impatient. Edith is still describing the scenery, the car, the dust, the heat, and then she suddenly shifts into describing a commercial she saw — without realizing she’s changed subjects. She talks about a product being advertised, and Mike and Gloria look confused.
Gloria finally interrupts her, exasperated:
“Ma, just skip to the end!”
Edith stops, surprised, and says something like, “Oh, well… the end was very sad,” and then tries to continue the story anyway, still not quite understanding why Gloria is frustrated.
Mike tries to gently steer her back, but Edith keeps mixing up the movie and the commercial, explaining them as if they were part of the same plot.
Additional research:
- ChatGPT uses a lot of words to tell me it’s probably not “The Commercial”. It asks me some clarifying questions, and I answer with “Mike was still living with the Bunkers. This was in the kitchen. It was a drama. It was just Edith and Gloria. She was retelling the whole plot.” After that, it does actually give me the correct answer. Too bad I wouldn’t have known all of that when I was actually looking for the scene.
- Gemini says “I encountered an error doing what you asked. Could you try again?”
- Grok says “Sign up to continue seamlessly with Grok’s full power”
- Perplexity says it’s “The Commercial”.
And I’m not good at telling jokes, but the punchline goes: in my journey of watching every episode of All in the Family in order, the episode I watched today was season 5, episode 13.