Ask A Genius 1536: AI Ethics, Grigori Perelman, and Storytelling
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/10/07
How do issues of AI deepfakes, personal comparisons, and family storytelling intersect in Rick Rosner’s reflections on memory, identity, and cultural ethics?
In this dialogue, Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner explore a wide range of topics, from Robin Williams’s daughter objecting to AI-generated clips of her late father, to Rosner’s discomfort at being compared to mathematician Grigori Perelman. The conversation touches on ethics, memory, self-presentation, and cultural sensitivity in an age of artificial media. Rosner expands into personal reflections, weaving in anecdotes about his family life in Albuquerque and speculative narratives about Los Angeles in the 1970s. The exchange highlights the tensions between authenticity and fabrication, personal identity and public image, while underscoring the importance of storytelling in shaping perception.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You sent you a couple of articles.
Rick Rosner: One was about Robin Williams’s daughter asking people to stop sending her AI clips of her dad. She has been receiving many of them.
Jacobsen: That is awful. When AI audio first took off, someone even made a whole “George Carlin” album from his past material, and his daughter Kelly was horrified.
Rosner: I think people believe they are doing her a favor—honoring his memory with AI versions. But it ties into SAP, the single-avatar policy controlled by the family. Nobody wants fabricated material of people who have passed away.
Jacobsen: You were only genuinely offended one time in our entire writing and collaborative career.
Rosner: Want me to tell the story?
Jacobsen: It was fairly recent, maybe within the last year or few. The next day, you seemed calmer, and my inference was that you had talked it over with Carole. But at the time you actually said, “I’m genuinely offended.”
What happened was that I said, “Look at this guy—he looks like you.” The guy was Grigori Perelman. You were not amused. He’s a very hairy man, of Eastern European Jewish background, living in Russia, while you’re living in the American Southwest. I should have held my tongue, because right after I said it, I realized I’d never seen you react like that before. I’d seen clips of you angry—like the time with JD and Lance when a chair got thrown—but that was a different context. This was more a strict defense against an unflattering comparison.
Rosner: I think it was mostly the hair. Perelman has, let’s just say, unfortunate hair. Men who look like me usually lose theirs, while guys like Carlos Santana, who I also resemble, hide it under a bandana for decades because their hair situation isn’t great either. Perelman, by contrast, doesn’t seem to care at all about presentation. He looks perpetually disheveled.
Carole teased me recently. JD has a thing for women her age—he thinks she’s hot. I agree she is, but I joked that I wish she wore less comfortable pants. She’s been living in baggy sweats for a few years now. I said I’d prefer she wear something tighter, since she could, but she likes to be comfortable. When I told her this, she shot back, “Me? Look at you!” And she was right—I wear the same gym pants and boots every day with interchangeable T-shirts. The difference is, I go to the gym multiple times a day, so even if I dress like hell, my physique is in shape.
Perelman, though, seems like a man in a permanent mathematical haze. I doubt he exercises.
Jacobsen: After all, he solved the Poincaré conjecture, was awarded the Fields Medal and the million-dollar Clay Millennium Prize, and turned them both down. He retired from mathematics and, according to reports, still lives with his mother in St. Petersburg, avoiding publicity.
Rosner: So, unlike me—or Carlos Santana—he’s not teaching at a U.S. university, not publishing, not doing outreach. He just lives quietly.
It reminds me of Slow Horses, the spy series with Gary Oldman, where brilliant but eccentric people end up tucked away out of sight.
Slow Horses is about a branch of MI5, the British equivalent of the FBI, called Slough House. MI5 proper works out of a big, gleaming headquarters in London, but if you screw up, you get exiled to Slough House, where all the misfits end up. The premise is that these “losers” aren’t truly incompetent—they’re unlucky, abrasive, or bad at teamwork—but by the end of each season, they stumble into unlikely victories.
The leader of this band is Jackson Lamb, played by Gary Oldman. He’s brilliant but utterly disheveled—he drinks constantly, chain smokes, rarely bathes, and looks like he hasn’t changed clothes in years. He’s greasy, cynical, and doesn’t care about appearances.
That’s what reminded me of Grigori Perelman. He has that same rough, unkempt look, as if he doesn’t give a damn. It’s as though he gave up on caring about romance or social approval decades ago—if he ever cared at all. That was why I was offended by the comparison. I can be a slob in some ways, but in others I keep myself kempt.
Anyway, what should we do now? I could tell a story. I had planned a “story time” segment on the show last night, but I forgot the manuscript. In its place, I’ll tell a story from my own life, which I’ve always thought had the makings of something entertaining—based on my family in the 1970s.
Growing up, I had two families. My Boulder family was my mom and stepdad. My Albuquerque family was my dad and stepmom, where I spent one month a year for visitation. That household was more fun, but by the late ’70s, it was unraveling. Albuquerque itself didn’t help—an edgy town, prone to stirring people into bad behavior. My stepmom was having an affair, the kids were running wild, and things were generally unstable.
I thought about this recently while walking with Carol in Beverly Hills after a movie screening. I was struck by how much more exciting Los Angeles feels—the things that can happen to you there are simply better than the things that can happen to you in Albuquerque.
That gave me a “what if” idea: what if, in 1976, my dad—a CPA—had discovered his wife’s affair and decided to pack up the family and move to Los Angeles to start over?
My dad’s brother was a Beverly Hills neurologist. He and his wife were friends with Jack Warner, the movie mogul who ran Warner Brothers. So I imagine: what if, in desperation, my dad had asked his brother to pull some strings? The uncle goes to Jack Warner, and suddenly my dad lands a job as a CPA for Warner Brothers Studios. They even help set him up with a condo.
Now picture this: our whole unruly family of Albuquerque rubes transplanted into Los Angeles in 1976. Meanwhile, back in Boulder, I was going stir-crazy. I had started lifting weights, but my reputation was fixed as a nerdy weirdo. The idea of ever getting close to a girl in Boulder seemed impossible. So in the story, when my Albuquerque family makes the jump to LA, I decide to join them. Nobody in that household is thrilled, but they grudgingly let me in. I transfer to Beverly Hills High, determined to reinvent myself—which I absolutely do.
The setup practically writes itself. In Albuquerque, your opportunities for mischief are limited by Albuquerque. In Los Angeles, trouble has range. You can go further, fall harder, and dream bigger.
So my character arrives in LA determined to look like a badass. He wears Frye boots to gain some height, tight white jeans to show off his weightlifter’s thighs, and a secondhand letterman’s jacket he picked up at a thrift shop to signal he’s on the football team. He’s ready to walk into Beverly Hills High like he owns it.
Then there’s this moment from real life. The two families—my uncle and his wife, who was an aspiring actress, plus my dad, stepmom, siblings, and me—go out to lunch at the Hamburger Hamlet on Sunset. I sit next to my uncle’s wife. And she starts playing footsie with me. Running her foot up and down my leg under the table. Even as a kid, I knew exactly what that meant: she wanted to fool around.
It made no sense. Her husband, my uncle, was right there. I was just a teenager. And the strangest part? She was wearing orthodontic headgear. Full-on contraption—bars coming out of her mouth, wrapping around her head, the kind of thing you’d only see when someone’s bite had to be completely reconstructed after a dental disaster. So here she was: attractive, yes, but with this surreal medical hardware strapped to her face, sending me signals in front of the family.
I froze. What could I do? I wasn’t going to “get with” my own uncle’s wife at a family lunch. Later, I found out she had a habit of pulling stunts like that.
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