It’s the second day of February, which means we’re once again turning to the weather forecast for rodents (and other animals) out of their burrows. Creatures that see or do not see their shadow on Groundhog Day are notoriously unreliable. Some, including the famous Punxsatawney Phil (predicting six more weeks of winter this year), are they are wrong more often than they are right. And it’s not like we can ever really hold these little furry guys accountable or check their work.
This sounds a lot like AI.
I’m not suggesting replacing Phil with a chatbot, or a hologram Besides. Simply, relying on AI to I’m telling you the right thing Or predict the future it’s a bit like getting a prediction from a creature at a place called Gobbler’s Knob.
In any case, I asked some popular AI models to pretend to predict the groundhogs and tell us whether we will have six more weeks of winter or an 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 groundhog fanfiction in the replies.
ChatGPT predicts six more weeks of winter
OpenAI’s popular chatbot (using the ChatGPT-5.2 model) predicted six more weeks of winter, with one difference:
“But — leans conspiratorially — it’s going to be a sneaky winter,” he said. “A false spring here, a sunny 62-degree day there, just enough hope to make you put the coat away…before winter comes back like ‘surprise, nerd.'”
This seems fair.
(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET’s parent company, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI last year, alleging that it violated Ziff Davis’ copyrights in the training and operation of its AI systems.)
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Claude calls for an early spring
Anthropic’s AI tool Claude (running Sonnet 4.5) predicted an early spring. That’s all I need to hear. But the AI has doubts:
“Now, between you and me, when it comes to groundhogs, I’ve always been a little skeptical of this whole shadow-based method of weather,” he said. “The correlation between the cloud cover on February 2 and the weather conditions over the next six weeks is…let’s not exactly what atmospheric scientists would call robust. But tradition is tradition, and people seem to like it!”
A meteorology student is conducting research.
Gemini copies Phil’s notes
Just like Punxsatawney Phil, Google Gemini 3 the model told me he expected a longer winter. I can’t tell if he generated the prediction from scratch or if he knew what Phil had already done earlier in the morning, but, speaking as Phil, he said he saw his shadow.
“It appears that the winter winds are not yet ready to pack their bags,” the statement said. “While some of you may be frustrated putting on your parka, remember that I am just a messenger: a highly specialized, fur-clad messenger with a historic accuracy rate of 39% (give or take a few snacks).”
Gemini asked me if I wanted a second opinion from one of his groundhog peers. I asked for the word in Ohio, and it told me that Buckeye Chuck predicted an early spring. I suspect that Gemini bases its information more on actual facts than mere speculation, but even the AI reports that these “facts” are unreliable.
Marmots are a great model for AI accuracy
Just as different AI models can say different things based on the same prompts and information, different groundhogs can predict different weather conditions on the same day and under relatively similar atmospheric conditions. The lesson is the same: Be careful when making decisions based on something you can’t verify yourself – and hold yourself accountable.
Learn more: Do you use ChatGPT? Avoid These 11 Tasks
