9 August 2026
Somebody Help Me, I’ve Paid for the Same Wrong Answer Twice.
On Tuesday night, at roughly the hour when the smoke alarm likes to chirp for no reason, I asked an AI to check a date for me. A small thing. One date, for one paragraph, in one chapter.
It answered instantly, confidently, beautifully… and wrongly. So I told it so, and it apologised with the lavish sincerity of a hotel manager who has just found a stranger’s sock in your bed, and it generated a new answer, and somewhere in a data centre a little meter went tick, tick, tick.
I paid for both. The lie and the correction. Full price, twice.
No other business on this entire spinning planet gets to run this racket. If the waiter brings you the wrong meal, the wrong meal goes back and the right one arrives and you pay once. If your mechanic fits the wrong part, he does not present you with an invoice titled Parts, Incorrect followed by a second one titled Parts, Correct This Time, Sorry Hey. But Otto gets it wrong (all AI models are called Otto now, I’ve decided, it helps), and Otto’s boss sends me a bill for eleventy hundred thousand tokens, and everybody carries on as if this is a normal way to sell things.
So the argument writes itself, surely. Refund the tokens. Wrong answer, money back. Simple as a Sunday.
Except I have now spent three days arguing with myself about this, out loud, in the kitchen, to the visible concern of my children, and I regret to inform you that the other side has a point, and I hate it here.