Deepfake Deepcake: Shirley Buttsnap

This month we're mocking deepfakes. Today's is less funny and more strange. Don't look at me.

Somewhere I was saying that the greatest of all forestry words is surely buttsnap. (Buttsnap is when wind breaks trees near the ground.) Then, channeling Airplane! and laughing at the name, I idly wondered if anyone had used it.

Well, Google hooked it in a whole new direction. What on Earth? I searched around and watched the movie, and of course I found no connection. Apparently a strange case of sycophancy, the tendency of large language models to be yes-men.

Wow! Utter incompetence. These things will say anything.

Not a bad movie. I like the link for separating truth from fiction. All of this month’s examples happen to be from Google, and in chronological order: 2023-12-28, 2024-06-15, 2025-05-01. Not obvious progress. Shirley, Netflix, 2024. Airplane! Paramount Pictures, 1980, clip on YouTube. Robert Wellman Campbell, "Deepfake Deepcake: Shirley Buttsnap," RSS Longa, 19 February 2026, public domain via CC0 1.0.