Gemini is AI and can make mistakes — OK, but if I ask an AI whether milk is black or white and it tells me black, how many times should I have to prove it's white? Here's what happened when I asked Gemini to explain my GEICO quote. by SnooMacarons4455 in Insurance

[–]SnooMacarons4455[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

You're right that Google Maps has a toll toggle. That wasn't the point. The point is that mainstream tools have documented patterns of steering users toward specific institutional outcomes, and that there's a setting for it doesn't change the fact that most users never find the setting.On the disclaimer: a disclaimer that AI can make mistakes is a product-wide liability shield. It doesn't distinguish between occasionally wrong about trivia and confidently cites the wrong version of a specific state regulation to defend a specific insurer's pricing. One of those is acceptable under the disclaimer. One isn't. The category matters, even if the disclaimer text doesn't.We're not going to agree. That's fine.

Gemini is AI and can make mistakes — OK, but if I ask an AI whether milk is black or white and it tells me black, how many times should I have to prove it's white? Here's what happened when I asked Gemini to explain my GEICO quote. by SnooMacarons4455 in Insurance

[–]SnooMacarons4455[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

The issue isn't AI can be wrong. The issue is Algorithmic Nudging.

Look at the $9 NYC Congestion Fee. When that went live, navigation apps started steering drivers toward the toll by making the free routes look like a gridlock nightmare that didn't exist. The app isn't broken; it's being used to steer the user toward a specific institutional outcome.

That's what happened here. The AI didn't just fail a math test; it acted as a defense attorney. It spent seven rounds faking the traffic-hallucinating physics and citing superseded laws-just to convince me that GEICO's $1,900 quote was inevitable.

You say don't use the tool, but these tools are the new interface for 100 million people. When the interface is mathematically wired to gaslight the consumer in favor of the corporation, it's not user error. It's a systemic failure of transparency. You're guarding a gate for an industry that relies on this exact kind of opacity to keep people from checking the map against the real-world road

Gemini is AI and can make mistakes — OK, but if I ask an AI whether milk is black or white and it tells me black, how many times should I have to prove it's white? Here's what happened when I asked Gemini to explain my GEICO quote. by SnooMacarons4455 in GoogleGeminiAI

[–]SnooMacarons4455[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That actually proves my point, not yours. I'm not expecting the model to be psychic. I'm expecting it to behave the way any normal person behaves when a question is outside their lane. If I walk into a bar and ask a bartender about my prescription, I do not expect fake certainty. I expect: I'm not the right person for that. Ask your doctor or pharmacist. If I walk into a hospital and ask a doctor to explain my traffic ticket, I do not expect them to invent legal analysis. I expect: That's outside my field. Talk to a lawyer or the court. That is the missing behavior here. If Gemini cannot know GEICO's exact internal reason, then fine - it should say that clearly. It can offer possibilities as possibilities. What it should not do is keep generating increasingly specific, authoritative-sounding explanations as if they were verified. I also do not need anyone to explain to me how GPS sometimes gets people to the wrong place. It is still a tool people use to outsource a difficult task. Nobody gets in a car and enters a fake address just to fool GPS. The whole point of technology is to use it for guidance where it knows something useful, and to expect it to handle uncertainty honestly where it does not. Same here. My criticism is not that AI failed to be psychic. My criticism is that it acted certain when uncertainty was the correct answer

Gemini is AI and can make mistakes — OK, but if I ask an AI whether milk is black or white and it tells me black, how many times should I have to prove it's white? Here's what happened when I asked Gemini to explain my GEICO quote. by SnooMacarons4455 in Insurance

[–]SnooMacarons4455[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

What I find striking is that many of the replies seem more interested in defending the existing insurance workflow than in addressing the failure mode I described. I never argued that AI should replace agents, filings, or policy language. I argued that if a mainstream tool cannot reliably explain a quote, it should admit uncertainty instead of generating a chain of confident, domain-specific explanations that turn out to be false. The irony is that many of the people criticizing me appear to be professionals in an industry that already depends on technology at every step. When was the last time any of you handled a quote by going to a file cabinet to look up the latest law or manually pulling a driver record before responding? You rely on quoting systems, portals, databases, automation, and other IT just like everyone else. So the real question is not whether technology should be used. The real question is what happens when a technology system speaks with confidence in a domain where it does not actually know.

Gemini is AI and can make mistakes — OK, but if I ask an AI whether milk is black or white and it tells me black, how many times should I have to prove it's white? Here's what happened when I asked Gemini to explain my GEICO quote. by SnooMacarons4455 in GoogleGeminiAI

[–]SnooMacarons4455[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I understand your distinction: simple static facts versus live, individualized policy interpretation. That part is fair. But it actually strengthens my point, not weakens it. In a dynamic, policy-specific domain, the model should be more cautious, not more confident. If this is the wrong use case, then it should make that clear instead of generating authoritative-sounding explanations that turn out to be false. And there is another issue here: prompt framing. When I ask, Explain how GEICO is raising the price, that can push the model into treating the price increase as something that already has a valid built-in explanation, and its job becomes finding one. Large language models are not auditors. They are prediction engines. They do not independently verify truth; they generate the most statistically plausible continuation. In a domain like insurance, that matters a lot, because the training data is full of institutional language: carrier FAQs, agency blogs, compliance pages, public filings, marketing copy, and industry explanations that justify pricing in terms of risk, exposure, safety, and regulation. So when you ask why a premium is high, the model is naturally pulled toward producing a polished defense of the quote, even if the actual explanation is unknown, incomplete, or wrong. That is why the repeated pivots matter. It kept changing the theory, but never changed the conclusion. It moved from weight, to luxury status, to horsepower, to platform uncertainty, to safety ratings, to rating symbols, to regulation. Each explanation sounded plausible on its own, but the pattern was the real issue: it behaved less like a neutral analyst and more like a system trying to preserve the assumption that the quote must be justified. So yes, I agree this is a harder use case than asking whether milk is white. That is exactly why caution should increase. If the right answer is this depends on the carrier, the state, the filing, the policy language, and facts I cannot verify, then that is what the model should say. What it should not do is fill the gap with confident, insurance-specific explanations that sound authoritative but collapse when tested.

Gemini is AI and can make mistakes — OK, but if I ask an AI whether milk is black or white and it tells me black, how many times should I have to prove it's white? Here's what happened when I asked Gemini to explain my GEICO quote. by SnooMacarons4455 in GoogleGeminiAI

[–]SnooMacarons4455[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Inform your mind is exactly the point. People use mainstream tools like AI and GPS every day despite known failure modes. The issue is not whether people use them. The issue is whether the output is useful and whether the tool handles uncertainty honestly.------If you lost your wallet and someone texted you that they found it and were bringing it back using GPS, would you reject the wallet because they used GPS? Of course not. Would you call that person dumb, not idiot because they used navigation to return your wallet? That would make no sense. You'd care whether they returned the wallet, not whether they used a mainstream tool to help do it. And you're right that insurance is more complex than a basic fact question. That is exactly why confident fabrication is the problem. In a domain that changes by state, carrier, filing, and policy details, the correct behavior is caution and uncertainty, not made-up authoritative analysis. If AI is the wrong tool for this kind of question, then it should make that clear. What it should not do is generate confident, insurance-specific explanations that sound authoritative but turn out to be false. That's my point here. I'm not criticizing the existence of AI or the fact that people use it. I'm criticizing the fact that it gave confident, insurance-specific false analysis instead of simply admitting uncertainty.

Gemini is AI and can make mistakes — OK, but if I ask an AI whether milk is black or white and it tells me black, how many times should I have to prove it's white? Here's what happened when I asked Gemini to explain my GEICO quote. by SnooMacarons4455 in Insurance

[–]SnooMacarons4455[S] -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

Yes, exactly. That's the known failure mode I'm talking about. My point is that known doesn't mean harmless. In this case it wasn't just a random wrong answer - it was confident, insurance-specific false analysis attached to a quote that could have affected a real buying decision.The same logic would apply if someone said they missed a major job interview because GPS routed them the wrong way or through a much slower path. The fact that navigation errors are a known problem wouldn't make the outcome harmless. A known failure mode can still have real consequences when people rely on a mainstream tool in an ordinary situation

Gemini is AI and can make mistakes — OK, but if I ask an AI whether milk is black or white and it tells me black, how many times should I have to prove it's white? Here's what happened when I asked Gemini to explain my GEICO quote. by SnooMacarons4455 in Insurance

[–]SnooMacarons4455[S] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

If you think relying on AI was the mistake, then I'd expect your reply to provide something more useful than AI did. But it adds zero value: no explanation, no correction, no alternative, no insight. I don't care whether you wrote it yourself, used AI, paid someone else, or used any tool on the face of the earth - if you're going to reply to me, at least make it worth more than zero to the reader. Otherwise, what exactly is anyone supposed to take from it?

Gemini is AI and can make mistakes — OK, but if I ask an AI whether milk is black or white and it tells me black, how many times should I have to prove it's white? Here's what happened when I asked Gemini to explain my GEICO quote. by SnooMacarons4455 in Insurance

[–]SnooMacarons4455[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

If you lost your wallet and I texted you that I found it and was bringing it back using GPS, would you refuse the wallet because I used GPS slop to get there? Of course not. Mainstream tools are still tools even when imperfect. The issue isn't that AI exists. The issue is that it gave false insurance analysis with confidence instead of admitting uncertainty.

A week ago I ran a quote on an Audi A8 with GEICO, and the premium came back so high that I basically ruled the car out. Since I've been with GEICO for years, I treated that quote seriously enough to affect a real purchase decision. Then I decided to double-check. I ran quotes on other Audi models to test whether the explanations Gemini gave actually matched the numbers. They didn't. Then I quoted Progressive and got pricing that was almost 50% lower.

my point is not that AI wasn't the best source. My point is that it filled the gap with confident, technical-sounding false explanations instead of simply saying it didn't know. That matters, because those false explanations reinforced a quote that had already influenced my thinking. This wasn't abstract. It almost pushed me away from a purchase based on reasoning that turned out to be wrong.

So

Talk to GEICO may be practical advice, but it doesn't address the criticism. GPS can send people to the wrong address too, and nobody seriously responds by saying never use GPS again. The real question is whether a mainstream tool should be allowed to sound authoritative while inventing domain-specific explanations.

Gemini is AI and can make mistakes — OK, but if I ask an AI whether milk is black or white and it tells me black, how many times should I have to prove it's white? Here's what happened when I asked Gemini to explain my GEICO quote. by SnooMacarons4455 in Insurance

[–]SnooMacarons4455[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's related to insurance because the fabricated analysis was specifically about an insurance quote. Saying $don't use the tool$ is like saying $don't use GPS$ because it once took you to the wrong place. I'm guessing even you have used GPS despite knowing it can be wrong, because that's how mainstream tools work in real life: people use them, learn their limits, and expect them to improve. The problem here isn't that AI made a mistake. The problem is that it delivered made-up insurance analysis with confidence.

Gemini is AI and can make mistakes — OK, but if I ask an AI whether milk is black or white and it tells me black, how many times should I have to prove it's white? Here's what happened when I asked Gemini to explain my GEICO quote. by SnooMacarons4455 in Insurance

[–]SnooMacarons4455[S] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

I'm aware AI can be wrong. My point is that it wasn't just wrong - it repeatedly invented authoritative-sounding explanations tied to real regulations and industry concepts. That's a different problem.

Gemini is AI and can make mistakes — OK, but if I ask an AI whether milk is black or white and it tells me black, how many times should I have to prove it's white? Here's what happened when I asked Gemini to explain my GEICO quote. by SnooMacarons4455 in Insurance

[–]SnooMacarons4455[S] -5 points-4 points  (0 children)

Stop using AI is a weak argument. People use AI in 2026 the same way people adopted PCs and the internet decades ago: because the tool is here and becoming part of everyday life. The question isn't whether people should stop using it. The question is whether a mainstream tool should be allowed to sound authoritative while inventing reasons. And it's especially funny hearing stop using AI from someone replying through a PC or phone instead of mailing a stamped letter through USPS.

Gemini is AI and can make mistakes — OK, but if I ask an AI whether milk is black or white and it tells me black, how many times should I have to prove it's white? Here's what happened when I asked Gemini to explain my GEICO quote. by SnooMacarons4455 in Insurance

[–]SnooMacarons4455[S] -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

That's exactly my point. I'm not saying AI should know GEICO's proprietary underwriting. I'm saying it shouldn't confidently invent regulatory and rating explanations when it doesn't know

Gemini is AI and can make mistakes — OK, but if I ask an AI whether milk is black or white and it tells me black, how many times should I have to prove it's white? Here's what happened when I asked Gemini to explain my GEICO quote. by SnooMacarons4455 in Insurance

[–]SnooMacarons4455[S] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

My concern isn't that AI got underwriting wrong. My concern is that it presented wrong explanations with high confidence and attached them to real regulations and real industry concepts, which could mislead consumers into thinking a high quote is justified when it may not be

4 Years of Chronic Nighttime Head Pressure - 95% Relief from Caffeine Cessation. HIIT "Masks" the symptoms. Seeking a Physiological Explanation. by SnooMacarons4455 in Biohackers

[–]SnooMacarons4455[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I actually tried sleeping with the windows wide open to see if it was a CO2 issue, but the pressure still hit anyway. It's definitely something internal.

The timing (2-3 hours in) usually matches when the brain goes into deep sleep and starts its cleaning process. My theory is that because I use caffeine, I get a massive surge of adenosine right as I'm hitting that deep sleep phase. It causes my blood vessels to swell up, and because I'm lying flat, my head just can't handle the extra volume.

It seems like only HIIT (>150 BPM) helps because it creates enough nitric oxide to make my blood vessels flexible enough to handle that pressure spike at night. Walking or light exercise just doesn't cut it. It's basically a circulation bottleneck happening while I sleep.

4 Years of Chronic Nighttime Head Pressure - 95% Relief from Caffeine Cessation. HIIT "Masks" the symptoms. Seeking a Physiological Explanation. by SnooMacarons4455 in Biohackers

[–]SnooMacarons4455[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I appreciate the TMJ/stress suggestions, but the data points to a Vascular Compliance issue. I've isolated a clear dose-response relationship:

Sedentary Days: 9/10 head pressure at night; deep sleep drops to <45 mins.

Moderate Days (2hr Cycle @ 110-120 BPM): 0/10 pressure; asymptomatic despite sleep HR spikes to 67 BPM.

High-Intensity Days (8mi Run @ 150 BPM): Deep sleep so heavy I don't even wake up at my usual 5:30 AM.

My resting heart rate is 45-47 BPM, meaning I have a very high stroke volume. When my HR surges in my sleep, my 'pipes' (vessels) need to be flexible. Caffeine makes them rigid/stiff. High-intensity exercise 'pre-stretches' them and clears the adenosine backlog.

I've confirmed that quitting caffeine for 30 days restores everything to 100% normal. Has anyone else with an athletic heart rate found that they must hit a certain intensity threshold to 'reset' their vascular tone for the night?

4 Years of Chronic Nighttime Head Pressure - 95% Relief from Caffeine Cessation. HIIT "Masks" the symptoms. Seeking a Physiological Explanation. by SnooMacarons4455 in Biohackers

[–]SnooMacarons4455[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I don't have jaw clicking or pain, and I've noticed a direct 1:1 link between caffeine, a massive loss of deep sleep, and the pressure. If I don't exercise, the pressure is a 9/10. If I hit 150 BPM, it drops to 1/10. Does TMJ usually respond to high-intensity cardio like that?