“Flying” from #Chicago to #Denver by #Amtrak 😉

The train beats the plane when it comes to hassle-free check-ins. There’s no checkin — you just proceed to the gate, which stays open until 5 minutes before departure. Luxurious seating and legroom. There’s no #TSA. No #ICE (yet). No baggage weight hassles…

And oh, the luxury of the seats and the legroom — See for yourself!

And I have the WHOLE coach to myself!!!

A journey with with public art and AI

They Mystery of Magdalene, My Skepticism, and AI
#Art #Chicago #Magdalene #sculpture #AI
https://warnercrocker.com/2026/04/18/they-mystery-of-magdalene-my-skepticism-and-ai/

They Mystery of Magdalene, My Skepticism, and AI

I love a good mystery. Especially when it is in public view, like the statue pictured below. (Click to enlarge.)

While in downtown Chicago yesterday I had some time on my hands and took a stroll along Michigan Avenue south of the Chicago River. As I said here, I felt like a tourist in my own town. I stumbled across a statue that seemed new to me.

I was so taken by the statue and its placement between, and prominently in front of two iconic statues from the 1920’s called The Bowman and The Spearman that I wanted to know more about what I thought was newer artwork. Given that there was no identification plaque anywhere near the statue, I decided to do what most of us do these days and look up information on the Internet.

I plopped a copy of the photo I took into Google search box and the result yielded the name of the statue as Magdalene by Dessa Kirk. That’s a link to a Facebook profile. Intriguingly Kirk doesn’t seem to have a website I can find, and examining her photos, I saw only one reference to the statue in question. As a spoiler, it appears Dessa Kirk is indeed the sculptor of this statue called Magdalene. But it took me a while to confirm that.

Magdalene can be found at the intersection of the Congress Parkway and Michigan Avenue in Chicago, and was installed in 2005. Sculpted with a combination of woven wood, branches, and found materials (recycled hoods and fenders of old cars,) combined with weathered metal. The “skirt” of the statue is filled with live flowers and climbing vines, which change the statue’s appearance with the seasons. On my visit I could see a few green sprouts starting to spring up.

Here is a link about the statue on the Chicago Park’s District website that lists her as the artist with a brief bio. I did not find that until after I had gone down the few rabbit holes I mention below.

In this age of dis- and mis- information, AI hallucinations, and AI everywhere — including Google’s search results — I’ve grown increasingly skeptical of just about everything.

Given my age, I’ve also grown increasingly less trusting of my own memory and powers of observation. Something rattling around in my brain didn’t quite sit right about the 2005 installation date. I’ve driven by and through that intersection many times since my return to Chicago in 2013 and I don’t recall seeing the statue. 

Before turning into bed for the night, I decided to do another search, this time instead of using Google’s regular old search box, I used Google’s Gemini. It turned up a completely different result, saying the statue was named Terra Nuestra by Hector Gomez and was a part of the Chicago Park District and Chicago Department of Cultural Arts Monument Response Project which just recently launched April 8th of this year. 

Checking out the link to the Monument Response Project I found no mention of this particular statue at this particular site, although there was information about Gonzalez and Tierra Nuestra at another site. 

So, at this moment I had two conflicting pieces of information from Google using different access to seek more information. Though Google’s search results presented the Dessa Kirk info in its AI summary at the top of the search results, I was still skeptical.

My initial thought was that if this was a part of an art installation project that had just begun 10 days ago, perhaps local news media, which yielded no results, and Google’s crawlers were just behind the curve. As was the Park District’s website. 

The AI generated description along with the project’s narrative that these pieces of artwork were to meant to counter existing narratives made perfect sense. Descriptions of this statue, very feminine, nurturing, and rising from the earth’s posture made, in my mind, a perfect contrast to the often criticized go west young man mythology of the two behind it.

I queried Google’s Gemini further, saying that I didn’t think Gomez’s sculpture was correct and it yielded this correction.

Another artist, another statue, correct location, same city-wide initiative. I queried Gemini further and got another correction.

Different results. Then, another attempt.

And again with different results.

And then again.

I then preceded to query ChatGPT and Claude. Here’s the first Claude response. Another artist enters the picture.

And again later.

ChatGPT did no better, no worse, and like the others proved of no use.

The bottom line is that my skepticism and distrust are more than well founded. What triggered me to go down these AI rabbit holes was that there was something logical about a statue I thought was new, that I kept getting conflicting results about, that pointed to a brand new city-wide art project. It made some sense in my growing skepticism. I wasn’t the only one going down rabbit holes.

What disappoints me, and I think should disappoint and be a warning to us all, is that a photo of something — in this case a public artwork that has existed since 2005 — should come up in any of these AI searches with relevant information. There’s an entire smartphone industry being built on a feature that tells us to point at anything and the robots will tell you what it is.

I should have trusted the first plain old Google search box even with the AI generated search summary at the top of the page. But long before this little search mystery I’d given up on that, given many of the previous errors that have yielded in the past. Tech companies relying on AI can through up all the caveats about possible inaccuracies they want to. I’d venture that it’s almost too late, because their initial promises, having been so broken that they now require those caveats, have already sculpted such a deeper narrative of mistrust in most minds, that they’ll live on as long as stone statues.

As to Magdalene and Dessa Kirk, I’m still very taken with the artwork. Another thing this episode tells me is that artists are going to need to be extremely diligent in crafting websites and publicity about their efforts going forward. They only have themselves to trust.

You can also find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.

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Chicago Weather - Apr 18, 2026 6:47 PM UTC

Now: 48°F, Mostly Clear
Humidity: 46%
Wind: Calm

Today: 50°F Mostly Cloudy (12% precip)
Tonight: 37°F Mostly Clear then Areas Of Frost (1% precip)

#ChicagoWeather #Chicago

Chicago Weather - Apr 18, 2026 6:01 PM UTC

Now: 46°F, Mostly Clear
Humidity: 53%
Wind: Calm

Today: 50°F Mostly Cloudy (12% precip)
Tonight: 37°F Mostly Clear then Areas Of Frost (1% precip)

#ChicagoWeather #Chicago

Moonie annihilated a 98mph fastball 431 feet to dead center for a GRAND SLAM last night! 🇯🇵 🤩 🧦 ⚾️ 🥔 #Chicago #MLB #MLBMastodon #ChicagoWhiteSox #SouthSideSox #GoGoSox #MunetakaMurakami

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGxKY7EvrzA https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lGxKY7EvrzA

Police officer shot his partner while on duty after she ‘broke off relationship’

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://metro.co.uk/2026/04/18/police-officer-shot-partner-duty-broke-off-relationship-28024381/