(not) fun with AI.

[cab67]

I started drafting a figure for a manuscript I'm writing for peer review. It describes some fossils from East Africa that belong to a particular branch of the crocodile family tree.

The figure includes a map showing where each of the specimens is from. The primary source for one of these sites doesn't itself have a map, but it provided the longitude and latitude coordinates.

My first approach was to load the coordinates into Google. I did this on the assumption that it would put the coordinates on maps.google.

Actually, the first result to come up was an AI-generated answer, and it was way off. So I tried again. And again.

For the first 9 tries, the answer was always different. The results included:

- Turkey
- Saudi Arabia
- Eritrea
- near Lake Abbay between Ethiopia and Djibouti
- the middle of the Gulf of Aden
- northern Senegal near its border with Mauritania
- the middle of the Gulf of Oman
- Benin
- near N'Damena, Chad.

After the location near N'Damena came up, the bot seemed to have made its mind up - every attempt made after that gave that result.

The site is in Kenya.

[Coventina]

1. Yeah, the pro-AI folks don't like to talk about this stuff.

They think AI will make learning facts and information obsolete.

"Why memorize facts, write code, research anything—when a model can do it in seconds?"

quote from Cluely founders

[BadgerKid]

2. AI can help with initial boilerplate content

But you still need expertise to adapt it.

[cab67]

3. if it can't express latitude and longitude coordinates within 2000 miles of their actual location -

- not sure I'd trust it for boilerplate.

My wife actually uses it for that, though.

[surrealAmerican]

4. If I were to guess ...

... I would assume that other people wrote similar things about the site in Chad.
What you have here is a plagiarism machine that can paraphrase.

[canetoad]

6. There's a whole video on youtube

About how hopeless AI is at making maps.