Oh. What's Occurin'?

I rarely quiz at the weekends. In fact I rarely quiz on any days other than Thursday every week, and one Wednesday each month. But I did go to a quiz on Sunday. Last month three of my daughters, my son in law Dan and Mary all attended a Disney themed quiz. I didn’t, partly so that I could look after my grandson Ollie, and partly because I’m strictly a Disney generalist while the girls and Dan are all ultra fans. They won, and the prize was a very impressive £50 meal voucher and £50 in cash.

Now when they got back their comments regarding the question master were of the ‘arse’ and ‘elbow’ variety.  Bear that in mind.

I staked my claim to a place in the team for the venue’s next quiz, last Sunday’s quiz, on the subject of sitcom Gavin and Stacey. Now, I always enjoyed Gavin and Stacey, and in the couple of weeks leading up to the quiz I watched every episode and all 3 Christmas specials again. Then , on Sunday afternoon, I decided to test myself. I googled Gavin and Stacey quiz. The first one on top of the search results page had 50 questions. Most of them were easy, but the half dozen or so I didn’t know, I memorised. Okay.

We got to the quiz, and on the way I joked, wouldn’t it be funny if the question master was such a rookie that he had just downloaded that same quiz off the net? Well, when we were given the answer sheets it certainly looked as if the question master really was just such a rookie. Because the headings for the five rounds were exactly the same as the headings on the quiz I downloaded. Then the quiz started. And the first question was the same as the first question on the quiz I’d downloaded. So was the second. And the third. In fact all of them.

Look, I didn’t plan it that way. But who was I to look a gift horse in the mouth? As it turned out anyway the gift horse was nothing like the gift it had seemed to be. For after the break between rounds three and four, our question master announced that the quiz was proving too easy, and so he’d made up another round using Chat GPT between the rounds. I wasn’t unduly worried. Even when he announced that this last round would be a Who Says This ? round. Well, we got there having scored 50 out of 50. Then for the improvised round, rather than using full quotations, he used which character says these short phrases. And the trouble is that many of them are said by more than one character at different times. So we got 6 on the round and lost by a point. Gutted.

I have never used Chat GPT for quiz questions. In fact I have never used it at all and after that I certainly won’t be using it for quiz questions any time soon. Do I blame the question master? Interesting question. Well, on the one hand, making up a quiz round after you’ve already started asking the questions is a no-no. But then so is downloading a quiz wholesale off the net which any member of the public and potential player could download themselves for free. The latter worked in our favour, the former worked against us. C’est la vie. We applauded the winners, thanked the question master, stayed until other teams started leaving then said our goodbyes without a word of complaint. I’ll leave it to you to decide how many of those were to be heard in the care on the way home, though.