Lost Certainty: What a 30-Year-Old Movie Quote Taught Me About Truth

I went down a rabbit hole yesterday after pulling out a movie quote for a new friend that I've been saying for 30+ years. It's from the movie The Silence of the Lambs, and the quote is from Hannibal Lecter. During the first meeting he has with an FBI agent played by Jodie Foster, he says, "Why do you think he removes their skins?" Agent Starling responds—and it's that last sentence that I've always loved.

The line I'd carried for decades was "thrall me with your acumen." When I first heard it, I went straight to my physical dictionary at the time to look up what thrall meant, and the definition I recall latching onto—because there were a few—was "n. a person in moral or mental bondage." Hannibal Lecter was so diabolical and had such an interesting cadence, lilt, and vocabulary, I assumed that's exactly what he meant. I love new words, so I've kept this in my pocket since then.

The person I was messaging is a pretty smart individual, and it made me want to double-check that quote because it had been so long. I had GPT open, and I asked, and that's where the rabbit hole began.

Not only did GPT tell me I had the word wrong, it told me I had the whole quote wrong. I pushed back, suggesting something similar and it pivoted to a different quote—with the same level of confidence as before, but now with additional hallucinated information.

GPT's first response

GPT pivots to a different quote with equal confidence

So then I went over to Google and Google's AI Overview was just as confident with its own claim:

Google's autocorrect offers yet another version

So now we have a third version in the mix that Google is also positive is the quote that's in the movie. Now I've got two AI bots in conflict with equal levels of confidence. I went and pulled up the transcript that I could find, and of course we now have our fourth entry: "thrill me with your wisdom."

The actual script says 'thrill me with your wisdom'

What about YouTube? The auto-generated CC captions decided to say "thrown me with your acumen." You can now mark 6 on your scorecard:

• Me: Thrall me with your acumen.
• GPT (take 1): Now please excuse me, I have to go and thrall myself with your acumen.
• GPT (take 2): You're so ambitious, aren't you? I thought that was your acumen.
• Google (Gemini): Enthrall me with your acumen.
• Script PDF: Thrill me with your wisdom.
• YouTube CC: Thrown me with your acumen.

I continued to look around different video platforms—almost no agreement anywhere. Even my own ears were having trouble, even after turning up the sound as loud as I could. It could be thrall, but it could also be throw. And then there's a strong argument that it's thrill. He's also leaning into a West Virginia accent that he mocks her with later in this monologue, but that's incidental.

And this is just a simple movie quote. It sat here for 30+ years because I was certain of what I knew. What happens when we have real questions about the past, about history, about anything really? I'm lucky that there's physical media out there to reference this, but it's also almost 40 years since that movie came out. The distance between it being ubiquitous in the lexicon of our culture is far in the rearview mirror. What about things that are only digital? How do we ensure we're getting the answers we want—and the correct ones?

I told this verbatim to Hypandra and it reflected back:

"Your question about digital-only information cuts deeper. We're living through the largest experiment in collective memory ever attempted, trusting our shared understanding to systems that autocorrect, algorithms that guess, and platforms that disappear. What happens to the texture of uncertainty when everything comes pre-packaged with confidence scores?

Consider this: instead of asking 'How do we get the right answer?' try 'What does it mean that there are multiple confident answers?' Your rabbit hole revealed something about the nature of knowing itself. Maybe the real question isn't about ensuring correctness, but about staying curious enough to notice when our certainties start to crack.

What other 'facts' in your life might benefit from this kind of gentle interrogation?"

I didn't just lose a movie quote—I had to rethink what certainty even means. And maybe that's the more honest thing to notice. Maybe that's where the real question begins.