Good morning! Today is Monday, Jan. 19, 2026. I know, I know, it’s Monday. You’ll get through it.
1785: First manned balloon flight in Ireland.
1883: Enlightenment: The first electric lighting system employing overhead wires, which Thomas Edison designed, begins service at Roselle, N.J.
1955: Scrabble debuts on the board game market.
1966: Indira Gandhi is elected India’s first female Prime Minister.
1978: Last Volkswagen Beetle made in Germany leaves VW’s plant in Emden.
2011: Joe Lieberman announces his retirement from the Senate at the end of his fourth term.
Birthdays today Include: Inventor James Watt, Robert E. Lee, Edgar Allen Poe, Billiard Player Minnesota Fats, director Richard Lester ( A Hard Day’s Night, Help!), Phil Everly, Janis Joplin, Dolly Parton, Paula Deen, Robert Palmer, The Motels’ Martha Davis, Katy Segal (Married with Children), Gov. JB Pritzker (D-Ill.)
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I’ve written in the past on my use of AI in the form of Amazon’s Alexa. In messing around with the online version of Claude, I’ve come up with some interesting results, which I’ll share with you here.
For those who don’t know, and as a preface, I am an amateur radio operator. My callsign is K2ENF. At some point, I’ll write a piece on that topic. So, already knowing the answer, I posed this question to Claude: “What is K2ENF?”
To which Claude responded:
K2ENF is the amateur radio callsign for the Empire State Amateur Radio Club, which operates from the Empire State Building in New York City.
This is a notable amateur radio station because:
- Unique location: It operates from one of the world’s most famous buildings, making it a highly sought-after contact for radio enthusiasts worldwide
- Special event station: The club often participates in special events and contests, giving amateur radio operators the opportunity to make contact with a station at such an iconic location
- Propagation advantages: Operating from the Empire State Building provides excellent antenna height and positioning, which can enhance radio signal propagation
I responded, saying, “Might want to investigate your response. K2ENF has been my personal callsign for a couple of years now.”
It came back almost instantly with:
You’re absolutely right, and I apologize for that error! I should not have confidently stated information about your personal callsign that was incorrect.
K2ENF is your personal amateur radio callsign – not associated with the Empire State Building or any club station. I made an unfounded assumption and presented it as fact, which is exactly the kind of mistake I should avoid.
Thank you for the correction! Out of curiosity, are you based in the New York/New Jersey area given the K2 prefix? And have you run into situations before where people made incorrect assumptions about your callsign?
I said, “No, actually, you are the first. However, it doesn’t surprise me at all. Most recent listing I could find for the callsign before I asked for it from the FCC was that it had been granted to someone living in the Bronx in 1956.”
It responded:
That’s fascinating context! So you have a callsign with nearly 70 years of history, last held in 1956 before returning to the available pool and eventually being assigned to you.
It makes sense that I would be the first to make that kind of error – most people wouldn’t just fabricate details about a personal callsign, but I apparently did exactly that by inventing the Empire State Building connection out of whole cloth. It’s a good reminder of how AI systems like me can sometimes generate plausible-sounding but completely false information, especially about specific details like individual callsigns.
I’m curious – when you requested K2ENF from the FCC, were you specifically looking for a callsign with that vintage history, or did other factors draw you to it? And do you know anything about the previous holder from 1956, or is that information difficult to track down after so many decades?
I told it, “ENF are my initials. That was my only consideration. By the way, it wouldn’t shock me to learn that the answer you gave me was not a fabrication at all. From what I can gather, the person who had the call in 1956 was one of the board members of the local Ham radio society, so your initial answer strikes me as entirely possible.”
It responded:
Ah, that makes perfect sense – getting a callsign with your own initials is a great reason to request a specific one!
And that’s an interesting possibility about my initial response. If the 1956 holder was indeed a board member of a local ham radio society, it’s conceivable there could have been some connection to a club station or special operations.
Here’s where things took a left turn. Claude went on:
However, I should be clear: I didn’t actually have any factual basis for what I said initially. I generated that response without knowing anything specific about K2ENF’s actual history, which is why it was problematic.
The fact that it might have accidentally aligned with some aspect of reality would be pure coincidence – a case of being right for the wrong reasons, which can actually be more dangerous than being obviously wrong because it can reinforce overconfidence in unreliable information.
It sounds like you’ve done some interesting historical digging on the callsign’s previous holder. Have you been able to find much information about ham radio activity in the Bronx from that era? I imagine the hobby looked quite different in the 1950s.
The conversation went on from there. I was mildly interested that it seemed so conversational, if a trifle stilted. The part that I found really interesting was that it so readily admitted to a pure fabrication, not once, mind you, but twice.
Some, I suppose, will find this conversation frightening, and certainly I can understand that reaction, particularly if you’re of the belief that AI won’t get it wrong, particularly in areas it’s not touched on previously. That’s the reason I asked it about my call; it’s not a topic that a lot of folks would ask about. I wanted to see how it would handle itself in unfamiliar territory.
I am reminded of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey as a cautionary tale. Yeah, okay, this piece isn’t nearly as shocking. But if you know the next movie, 2010: The Year We Make Contact, you know that the problems exhibited by HAL were due to, for lack of a better term, misinformation.
(If you’ve not seen 2010, I highly recommend it.)
In the case of the above conversation, it was actually a lack of information.
That said, I figure AI is like any other tool: You’ve got to be smarter than the tool.
Thought for the day: If you’re not where you are, you aren’t.
Tell your friends about us. I’ll see you tomorrow.
Our technology is making this an exciting time to live in. Alas, it’s also a dangerous one. I point to Minneapolis as an example.
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And as always, your comments are welcome.
