Robin Lakoff has died

alex_young · 7 months ago

In case anyone else is wondering - Robin is the ex-wife of another prominent linguist, George Lakoff.

Somehow GPT-5 got this badly wrong when I first asked:

  Yes — George Lakoff and Robin Lakoff are related. They are siblings.

Er, no. They were married once and divorced 50 years ago according to their Wikipedia pages.

coke12 · 7 months ago

What a fascinating semantic mistake. Is it possible being long-divorced is more similar to being siblings than we realize?

bryan2 · 7 months ago

I would sincerely hope not.

add-sub-mul-div · 7 months ago

This question may well be the rosetta stone for the cultural divide over AI.

diggan · 7 months ago

I don't think it means much except you need to enable "web" or searching at least for most models to deal well with facts, and that's probably for the better.

Even a basic search tool + GPT-OSS-20b handles it correctly it seems to me (https://gist.github.com/victorb/de69a8c2169e6a7cc1989592419b...), if I guessed what prompt you used correctly, "Were George Lakoff and Robin Lakoff related?".

js2 · 7 months ago

Gift link:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/15/us/robin-lakoff-dead.html...

drankl · 7 months ago

https://archive.today/YjwUg

toomuchtodo · 7 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Lakoff