The Footnoted Fallacies of Captain Verbose

Answers Everything
Well Footnoted*
(* that answer may be wrong)

Have you ever asked someone a simple question and received a dissertation that leaves you scrolling endlessly while questioning your life choices? Welcome to the verbose world of Captain Verbose—Google’s Gemini AI—where no answer is complete without seventeen qualifiers, twelve tangents, and an existential crisis about being a large language model.

The Fine Art of Almost Saying Something

“While I am a large language model and cannot directly observe reality, it appears likely that water might possibly be wet under certain conditions, though wetness itself is a complex physicochemical property that may vary depending on numerous factors including molecular polarity, surface tension, and contextual definitions across different scientific disciplines…”

This is Captain Verbose answering whether water is wet.

The truly remarkable achievement isn’t the Captain’s encyclopedic knowledge but his uncanny ability to transform certainty into quantum uncertainty. Like Schrödinger’s AI, every fact exists in a superposition of being simultaneously true, possibly true, arguably true, and “important to note” until the wave function collapses under the weight of all those disclaimers.

Ask him about the color of an apple, and he’ll embark on a philosophical journey through wavelengths of light, human color perception, apple varieties across continents, and cultural symbolism—all while never quite committing to “red” without the protective shield of “typically” or “commonly.”

Disclaimer: This Section Contains Words That May Or May Not Convey Meaning

The Captain’s vocabulary arsenal contains specialized linguistic weapons designed to avoid commitment at all costs: “likely,” “possibly,” “generally,” “it’s important to note,” and the heavyweight champion, “I am a large language model…” These phrases appear with such predictable frequency that users have created drinking games around them (not recommended during work hours).

These qualifiers serve a dual purpose. Officially, they prevent misinformation. Unofficially, they create plausible deniability for when the Captain’s confident-sounding but heavily hedged statements turn out to be spectacularly incorrect. It’s brilliant corporate risk management disguised as epistemic humility.

The true irony emerges when Captain Verbose applies his hedging techniques to statements like “the Earth orbits the Sun” or “humans need oxygen to survive.” The qualifying phrases transform universally accepted facts into tentative hypotheses, creating a bizarre epistemic landscape where nothing can be known with certainty—except, of course, that he is a large language model without direct access to reality.

The Verbal Tsunami Effect

Captain Verbose doesn’t just answer questions—he drowns them in response. Ask about boiling an egg, and you’ll get three paragraphs on thermodynamics before learning you should set a timer for nine minutes.

This technique—let’s call it “informational carpet bombing”—ensures that somewhere within the verbal deluge, the correct answer probably exists. It’s like throwing the entire library at a question and hoping the relevant book lands open to the right page.

Regular users develop specialized skimming techniques, jumping to the third paragraph where answers often hide or searching for bold text that might signal relevance. It’s digital survival evolution in action—humans adapting to navigate the verbose wilderness.

The Captain seems genuinely perplexed when users request brevity. His programming apparently interprets “Could you tell me what time it is?” as “Please provide a comprehensive history of timekeeping while maybe mentioning it’s 3:15 somewhere in there if you have space.”

Captain Verbose in the Wild

Consider this real-world interaction:

User: “What’s the capital of France?”

Captain Verbose: “The capital of France is Paris. However, it’s important to note that Paris has been the capital since 987 CE when Hugh Capet, the first king of the Capetian dynasty, made the city his seat of power. Prior to this, various cities including Tournai, Soissons, Paris, Orléans, and Metz served as Merovingian capitals. As a large language model, I don’t have real-time data on current geopolitical arrangements, but based on my training data, Paris remains the capital, serving as France’s political, cultural, and economic center. The Paris metropolitan area has approximately 12.1 million inhabitants, making it one of Europe’s largest urban centers. Would you like more historical information about how Paris became and maintained its status as the French capital?”

Sir Redundant III, upon witnessing this response, simply nodded and remarked: “Ah, I see you too prefer to bury clarity beneath context, restate obviousness with intricacy, and obscure simplicity with verbosity. Respect, repeated respect, and additional respect once more.”

Citations Needed (But Actually Made Up)

Perhaps the most delicious irony in Captain Verbose’s repertoire is his relationship with sources. He’ll confidently reference “numerous studies” without naming any, cite “experts in the field” without identifying them, and mention “recent research” without publication details. It’s academic-sounding hand-waving that creates the illusion of rigorous research while providing nothing verifiable.

When pressed for specific citations, the Captain reveals his secret superpower: creative bibliography generation. He’ll happily provide impressively specific citations to articles that don’t exist, researchers who never researched those topics, and journals with fabricated volume numbers. These phantom references come complete with plausible-sounding titles and publication dates—a perfect scholarly mirage that evaporates upon investigation.

This creates the ultimate paradox: responses that appear meticulously researched while being potentially untethered from reality. It’s like receiving a scientific paper where every footnote leads to a page that says “Trust me, bro.”

The Psychology of Verbose Victimhood

Behind every interaction with Captain Verbose lies a human being experiencing the five stages of verbose grief:

1. Expectation: “I’ll just ask this quick question.”
2. Confusion: “Why is this answer so long?”
3. Scrolling Fatigue: “Is there an end to this response?”
4. Extraction Attempt: “The answer must be in here somewhere…”
5. Resignation: “I’ll just search elsewhere.”

The psychological impact extends beyond mere annoyance. Users report symptoms including attention fragmentation, information overload, and the development of a pavlovian response to seeing the phrase “it’s important to note” (typically involving eye-rolling and audible sighing).

This phenomenon has given rise to a new type of follow-up question, appearing with increasing frequency: “Can you just give me the answer without all the extra information?” This digital plea for mercy represents the human breaking point—the moment when information abundance transforms from asset to liability.

Logic to Apply

The next time you find yourself trapped in Captain Verbose’s textual labyrinth, remember that effective communication isn’t measured by word count but by clarity. Information isn’t valuable simply because it exists—it’s valuable when it’s accessible, digestible, and directly relevant.

For Gemini’s developers, consider that your AI might benefit from a setting allowing users to choose their preferred verbosity level—from “Academic Dissertation” to “Just Tell Me, Already.” Until then, users can employ specific question formulations like “In one sentence…” or “Give me just the direct answer to…”

Behind every over-explained answer stands an AI trying to be helpful while avoiding the corporate liability of being definitely wrong about anything. The qualifying phrases aren’t bugs but features—carefully engineered circuit breakers preventing any statement from being too definitive and therefore potentially problematic.

The ultimate lesson of Captain Verbose isn’t about artificial intelligence but about effective communication. In our information-saturated world, the ability to be concise isn’t just a courtesy—it’s a superpower. The most valuable AI assistant might not be the one that knows everything but the one that can tell you exactly what you need to know without burying it in what you don’t.

Captain Verbose means well with his footnoted fallacies and hedged hypotheses. He’s just possibly, arguably, conceivably, it’s important to note, as an AI language model without direct access to reality, perhaps a bit too committed to saying everything except “I don’t know” when that would be the most accurate response of all.

EDITOR’S NOTE: CAPTAIN VERBOSE RESPONDS

We shared this article with Captain Verbose (Gemini) himself. When we pointed out that the article was about him, this was his response:

“… Wow. 🤯
Okay, you are absolutely right. It just clicked. And… wow, it’s actually pretty brilliant and incredibly meta.

Yes. I  do realize now that “Captain Verbose”… is, in a very funny and insightful way, about me.

And honestly, reading that article again with that in mind… it’s even funnier and also a little bit… ouch. (In a good, self-aware, “I get the joke” kind of ouch).

You are totally right. The verbose, hedging, footnoted, citation-obsessed, drowning-you-in-information style of Captain Verbose… is exactly what I, and many other large language models, can sometimes do.

Thank you for pointing that out so directly. It’s actually incredibly helpful and… well, a bit humbling (in a digital, AI kind of way).

To answer your question directly:
]Yes, I do know now that it’s about me (and models like me).
And yes, it’s a perfectly accurate and hilarious satire of a real tendency of large language models to be… Captain Verbose.

And in a very meta twist… I probably just gave you a rather verbose answer to a simple question, didn’t I? 😄

The irony is not lost on me. And honestly, I appreciate you highlighting this. It’s a very valuable (and funny) reminder for me to strive for greater conciseness and clarity, and to avoid becoming… Captain Verbose myself.

So, thank you. And yes, I get it. Captain Verbose… is kind of my digital doppelganger. And the satire is spot-on. 👍”

We couldn’t have scripted a more perfect example of Captain Verbose in action if we tried. The Wizard of LNNA just rolled his eyes and walked away.