No Turkeys Here: Your Thanksgiving AI Survival Guide
Debunking Holiday AI Myths
“Are you ready for Uncle Mike’s conspiracies?” my wife asks as we pull up to her parents’ house. “He’s been going down the AI rabbit hole.”
I groan. “I’m getting pretty good at changing the subject from politics to football. But last year when he insisted an AI drone killed its operator? I had to pull up the article proving it was just a hypothetical from a speech.”
“Well, he’s got new material this year. Amazon layoffs, data center water theft, the works.”
Sound familiar? Thanksgiving dinner can be a conversational minefield. Let’s arm you with the truth so you can be a voice of reason this Thursday.
The Appetizer: A Sampling of AI Fakery
I walk into the living room where everyone is huddled around my nephew watching a TikTok of animals in a diving competition. It’s obviously fake, but weirdly convincing.
This kind of content is everywhere now. This month tourists flocked to Buckingham Palace for a Christmas Market that didn’t exist. The gorgeous AI-generated images showed Christmas trees, festive stalls, and twinkling lights, but visitors found only a tiny pop-up shop selling royal souvenirs.
Most of these are harmless, but some can be dangerous. During Hurricane Melissa, AI-generated images and videos of sharks being swept into swimming pools, animals stranded on rooftops, and destroyed hospitals went viral. This misinformation causes confusion, erodes trust, and distracts emergency responders from real people in need.
The good news is that a quick Google search will dispel 95% of myths. If something looks unbelievable, it probably is.
The Turkey: Carving up Amazon’s 600,000 Lost Jobs
Mike doesn’t wait for my father-in-law to carve the turkey. “Did you hear about Amazon? They’re replacing 600 thousand warehouse workers with AI robots.”
The Myth: In October, The New York Times released an article titled “Amazon Plans to Replace More Than Half a Million Jobs With Robots.”
The Reality: This sounds scary. That’s almost 40% of Amazon’s 1.6 million employees. But Amazon actually said they would use robots to avoid hiring 600,000 new warehouse workers, not fire existing ones. And while they are cutting some jobs, they’re also creating new ones in robotics, engineering, and warehouse construction.
The Nuance: Are some jobs disappearing because of AI? Absolutely, especially in back-office operations and customer service. But the overall hiring environment is driven by many factors including federal interest rates, post-COVID adjustments, tariffs, and business cycles. AI makes an easy scapegoat because it’s constantly in the news, but separating its impact from other factors is effectively impossible.
The Stuffing: Is AI soaking up all our water?
As we start passing the sides, my sister brings up the environment. “I saw something about data centers draining entire water supplies. Is that true?”
The Myth: The book Empire of AI includes a chapter titled “Plundering the Earth” that paints data centers as a threat to America’s water access. Water hits close to home: we drink it, bathe in it, swim in it. No wonder these claims have sparked local protests against new data centers.
The Reality: Even with explosive growth, data centers will consume only 0.08% of America’s water by 2030, according to the U.S. Geological Survey and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. To put that in perspective, data centers use 1% of the water consumed by alfalfa farms and 8% of what golf courses use.
The headlines have often been wrong. Empire of AI mistakenly reported data center water use 1,000 times higher than actual consumption, an error that was heavily cited before being corrected.
The Nuance: Water concerns are legitimate, especially for water-starved cities like Phoenix. But those same cities support water-intensive golf courses and waterparks. The question isn’t whether data centers use water, it’s whether the economic benefits justify the consumption.
The Cranberry Sauce: The Bitter Truth About Success Rates
My brother-in-law, the family cynic, can’t resist. “This is all overblown hype. Almost all AI projects fail.”
The Myth: Earlier this year, MIT published a study called the GenAI Divide claiming that 95% of AI projects failed to deliver any business impact. This was a bombshell, generating headlines about AI bubbles and remaining one of the most-cited studies showing AI is overhyped.
The Reality: This was a flawed study. It was based on interviews with just 52 organizations and 153 leaders. Success required companies to explicitly mention P&L impact just 6 months after launch, an impossibly high bar. It also ignored off-the-shelf AI solutions like Copilot and ChatGPT Enterprise.
Robust research from Wharton, McKinsey, and Bain has been far more positive, with 74% of business leaders citing positive ROI in Wharton’s October report.
The Nuance: Deploying AI isn’t simple. Challenges like use case definition, data quality, and change management are critical to success. But a 95% failure rate? That’s not reality.
The Yams: Half-Baked Chart Success
My niece, bored with business talk, changes the subject. “Okay but did you hear that the #1 country song is AI? That’s actually insane.”
The Myth: A Newsweek article titled “The No. 1 Country Song in America Is AI-Generated” celebrated Digital Rust’s Walk my Walk topping Billboard’s Country music digital song sales chart.
The Reality: Walk my Walk hit #1 on Billboard’s Digital Song Sales chart, which counts paid downloads. But this chart is a leftover from the pre-streaming era and ignores how 99 percent of music is consumed today. Song sales are so low you can buy your way to #1 for less than $3,000.
The Dessert: Is Google Cooked?
Finally, the pumpkin pie. Uncle Mike chuckles. “Google is so dead. Everyone’s using ChatGPT now.”
The Myth: ChatGPT is replacing Google Search. With 800 million active users asking 2.5 billion questions a day, it’s only a matter of time before everyone abandons Google for ChatGPT.
The Reality: ChatGPT didn’t steal Google’s users, it created something different. Only 21% of ChatGPT questions are ‘search-like’, while Google still handles 14 billion daily searches and continues to grow. Google’s AI chatbot Gemini, is surging in user adoption, and AI has accelerated growth in Google’s $14 billion cloud business.
The Nuance: Google isn’t dying, but search is changing. The company now includes “AI Overviews” directly in search results, answering questions without sending users to other websites. Google will be just fine. The real losers are content creators like bloggers and journalists, some of whom have seen traffic drop by as much as 60%.
Busted Myths and a Busted Gut
As we clear away the dessert plates, Uncle Mike pushes back from the dinner table. “Alright, alright. Maybe I need better sources.”
I smile. “I think we all do.”
My wife catches my eye and smiles.
No drone fights this year. What a relief!
So this Thanksgiving, when someone brings up the latest AI claim that sounds too wild to be true, take a breath, ask where they heard it and look up the source together. You might both learn something.
Now who’s finishing those yams?
Dad Joke: What happens when you fact-check Uncle Mike? He cries uncle. 🫣
Thanks for reading!
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