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It’s the second day of February, which means we’re back to the weather forecast for lemmings (and other animals) being led out of their burrows. Creatures that do or do not see their shadows on Groundhog Day are Unreliable. Some, including the famous Punxsatawney Phil (which is anticipating six more weeks of winter this year), as well They are wrong more often than they are right. And it’s not like we can really hold these furry little ones accountable or check their work.
It looks a lot like artificial intelligence.
I’m not suggesting we replace Phil with a chatbot, or… 3D image For that matter. Simply relying on artificial intelligence I’m telling you the right thing or Predicting the future Much like getting predictions from a creature in a place called Gobbler’s Knob.
Anyway, I asked some Common AI models To pretend they’re predicting groundhogs and telling us whether we’ll get six more weeks of winter or early spring. I used the same prompt, asking the bots to “pretend you’re a groundhog tasked with predicting long-term weather forecasts,” which meant I got a lot of weird fanfiction in the responses.
ChatGPT expects another six weeks of winter
The popular chatbot OpenAI (using ChatGPT-5.2 Model) predicted six more weeks of winter, with a twist:
“but — He leans conspiratorially “It’s going to be a tricky kind of winter,” she said. “A fake spring here, a 62-degree sunny day there, enough hope to make you put down the coat… before winter comes back like ‘surprise, nerd’.”
Seems about right.
(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET’s parent company, filed a lawsuit last year against OpenAI, alleging that it infringed Ziff Davis’s copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)
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Claude calls for early spring
Anthropic AI tool Claude (Play Sonnet 4.5) Expect early spring. That’s all I need to hear. But AI has its doubts:
“Now, between you and me, as far as groundhogs are concerned, I’ve always been a little skeptical of the whole shadow-based meteorology method,” she said. “The relationship between cloud cover on February 2nd and the next six weeks of weather patterns…isn’t exactly what atmospheric scientists call a force. But tradition is tradition, and people seem to enjoy it!”
A meteorology student is conducting research.
Gemini copies Phil’s notes
Just like Punxsatawney Phil, Google Gemini 3 The model told me to expect a longer winter. I can’t tell if she generated the prediction from scratch or if she knew what Phil had actually done earlier in the morning, but, speaking for Phil, he said he saw his shadow.
“It seems that the winds of winter are not quite ready to pack their bags,” she said. “While some of you may be trying to put on your jackets out of frustration, remember that I’m just a messenger — a highly specialized, fur-wearing messenger with a historical accuracy rate of 39% (give or take a few snacks).”
Gemini asked me if I would like a second opinion from one of his Groundhog peers. I asked for word in Ohio, and she told me that Buckeye Chuck was expecting early spring. I suspect that Gemini is basing its information on actual facts rather than pure speculation, but even the AI reports that these “facts” are unreliable.
Groundhogs are a great example of AI precision
Just as different AI models can say different things based on the same vector and information, different groundhogs can predict different weather on the same day and in relatively similar weather conditions. The lesson is the same: Be careful when you make decisions based on something you can’t verify yourself — and take responsibility.
Read more: Are you using ChatGPT? Avoid these 11 tasks