Charlie StrossA map of Northern Ireland, as horked up by ChatGPT. (See alt text for the true horror.)
Do not trust ChatGPT to do your geography homework!
That is all.
Josh 
Mark Kraft@cstross Unster famously being where they play loud "oonz, oonz, oonz" electronic dance music until 3:00 a.m. every night.
Frank Skornia@cstross I can't wait for the first war to be fought over a border decided on by an AI-generated map </sarcasm>
Ted Mielczarek@tedmielczarek @fskornia Latest elsenet is that RFK Jr. used an LLM to write a whole chunk of healthcare policy claiming vaccines are poisonous and there's a childrens' health crisis caused by (waves hands).
We're all going to die to pad out Sam Altman's bank account.
gabriele renzi
WellsiteGeo
Angus McIntyre@fskornia @cstross In fairness, those six-fingered freaks in Trnsmoldistria brought it on themselves by attempting to annex our province of NaN, which -- as this map clearly demonstrates -- has been part of Bratwurstislava since Attila the Hen defeated Genghis Khan Noonien Singh at the bottle of Costco Polje.
Adonnen
Σ(i³) = (Σi)²
Walter van Holst@cstross Seen a similar botched map of Africa....
Paul Drye
Jeremy KahnI have never seen a more clear example of how ChatGPT & co are, at root, a distillation of
a short-attention-span American teenager bullshitting his way through a college undergrad presentation
Philomena Cunk would *never*
Uilebheist@cstross If you think that's bad try asking for something like the structural formula of some simple organic compound. Somebody tried glucose the other day, and the result was... wrong.
Ah yes and a map of Italy in which the smallest regions were expanded to include their neighbours and only 4 regions had the right name although of course the area was completely wrong.
And according to ChatGPT Italy has annexed Corsica.
Atomic Orbitals@Uilebheist @cstross Glucose is C6H12O6, isn't it?
@geoglyphentropy @Uilebheist Yes, just like a Boeing 737 is roughly 29,000kg of aluminium, plus a bit of titanium and carbon fibre composites.
@cstross @Uilebheist My chemistry is so rusty it isn't funny!
David Nash@geoglyphentropy @cstross @Uilebheist Former chemist here.
The atom counts in C6H12O6 are correct: each glucose molecule contains six carbon atoms, 12 hydrogen atoms, etc.
This is likely how you'd encounter it in a Chemistry 101 level of class, where you're mostly dealing with fairly simple reactions, like "how much carbon dioxide [CO2] and water [H2O] do you get when you burn glucose?" For reactions like those, just knowing the atom counts is fine.
For more specific reactions (like ones affecting just one part of the glucose molecule), or for visualizing how the atoms are connected, a more detailed representation is required. See, e.g. the structural diagrams in the Wikipedia article for glucose: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glucose .
Those are the ones that ChatGPT and similar applications get totally, hilariously wrong a lot of the time.
@dpnash @geoglyphentropy @Uilebheist Yes, hence my point about a Boeing 737 being 29,000kg of impure aluminium. It *slightly* ignores the importance of structural configuration …!
@geoglyphentropy @cstross Still better than the google one, which put a big "ITALY" where Algeria is in the normal maps. And moved Milan where Naples is.
Oh and drew a huge lake inside the former Yougoslavia, occupying most of what should have been land.
As for glucose... it managed to draw penta- and exa-valent Carbon atoms. Not sure where it hallucinated that.
(Can find where people posted about that here and link if one wants to watch the horror)
thepoliticalcat
Laberpferd@Uilebheist @geoglyphentropy @cstross
You might be interested to commission Professor Klapötke at University of Munich if they can actually synthesize that molecule
They already made C2N14
(but you should only whisper and dont switch on the light in the room, the atoms in these molecules are easy to scare and tend to flee away with high velocity)
@Uilebheist @geoglyphentropy @cstross > As for glucose... it managed to draw penta- and exa-valent Carbon atoms. Not sure where it hallucinated that.
From ingesting scans of bad Chem 101 homework problem answers? Or bad movie graphics from people trying to "make it science-y"? https://www.masterorganicchemistry.com/2010/08/27/common-mistakes-pentavalent-carbon/
@Uilebheist This is courtesy of Gemini, which seems to be especially hobbled in the realm of scientific fact.
Picture 1: Glucose. *Eight* carbons, and I don't even know what TF is going on with the hydrogens and oxygens. Many of the oxygens appear to be hexavalent, which goes beyond the occasional pentavalent carbon you see from Intro Organic students every so often.
Picture 2: Tweak prompt to remind Gemini of the correct number of atoms. Result: *the exact same chemically cursed image as before*.
Picture 3: Tweak prompt to change the colors from the standard black=C, red=O, light gray or white=H. All the atoms I *thought* were carbon before are apparently oxygen instead.
@Uilebheist Giving up on glucose, I asked for naphthalene (looks a little like two benzene rings stuck together). I got progressively weirder molecules, finally terminating in this one, which is ... two rings stuck together ... but that's its only concession to reality.
Take a look at that cursed carbon atom at the right side of the junction of the two rings. It's got five bonds to the carbon atoms it's bound to, plus at least three to the 3 hydrogens it's attached to, making a minimum of 8. I don't think I've ever seen an intro organic student come up with *octavalent* carbons before.
@dpnash As I said here:
https://polyglot.city/@Uilebheist/114598503942261983
There is no need to give me a special message to repeat that gemini is useless.
https://polyglot.city/@Uilebheist/114598503942261983
There is no need to give me a special message to repeat that gemini is useless.
Uilebheist (@Uilebheist@polyglot.city)
@geoglyphentropy@mstdn.social @cstross@wandering.shop Still better than the google one, which put a big "ITALY" where Algeria is in the normal maps. And moved Milan where Naples is. Oh and drew a huge lake inside the former Yougoslavia, occupying most of what should have been land. As for glucose... it managed to draw penta- and exa-valent Carbon atoms. Not sure where it hallucinated that. (Can find where people posted about that here and link if one wants to watch the horror)
Beans_please@cstross Londogrl is beautiful this time of year though.
Graham C@beans_please @cstross the Londogrl movement did wonders for DIY punk
Psittacus cafeinaAre you telling me ARRMAGH isn't a real place? Do better Ireland smh
The Queen of Weltschmerz🏳️⚧️@caffetiel @cstross I assume that’s where Irish pirates come from
Cait the Proud Trans WomanI just didn't know Londongrl was in Unster, is all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSi4CDANuUY
London Girl - The Pogues
James Wells@cstross
I see down, but where is up, and you mis-spelled Conan.
I see down, but where is up, and you mis-spelled Conan.
gjm@cstross Looks perfectly accurate to me.
Here's what Claude (Sonnet 4) produced for me. It's both much better and much worse.
Cadbury Moose
Jeff CraigYou could use that to deliberately nuke Belfast, but not Londonstrokederry. Anything less than about 100 Hiroshimas.
Now I'm thinking about the parallels between Belfast and Hiroshima. "Inland sea". Sizes aren't far off. Go-game temporarily interrupted by a nuclear bomb? - I'll have to check with Belfast's Gō club.
tautology@gjm @cstross I wanted to have a go and asked GPT to draw Yorkshire annotating the cities. It looks about right, until you see the cities are all over the place.
Winwaed@tautology @gjm @cstross no idea what those rivers are doing, but at least "Here be dragons" is correct!
(I was born in one of those cities and grew up in another - they're the right cities but in the wrong order , to paraphrase someone from aforementioned dragon territory)
Oli
onnob
Mark Lynch@cstross that monstrosity was shown in the middle of a segment during BBC NI’s “The View” last night, that consisted of local tech sector execs talking breathlessly about the inevitability of AI-driven productivity gains. I had to turn the TV off in disgust and actually went to bed feeling depressed at how utterly fucking unhinged is the sector in which I work. Why can’t these people see the blindingly obvious?
David Penfold 
Nomdeb
Thomas Lobig🐔🐔@mark_f_lynch I guess because Money (capital m) @cstross
Steve HerseyCredibly attributed top Upton Sinclair:
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”
blackcoat@mark_f_lynch @cstross "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
Limey_Tank@cstross That is beyond the pale…
@cstross saw basically the same thread in German a few days ago. But it had dudes yelling at the OP they would be using the wrong tool for the job etc. Was as depressing as the shitty map from the LLM.
Magnus Ahltorp
GLCMy first impression was that Unster wasn't bad but then I found Northern Ireland which is indeed somewhat doubtful.
Points for Londogrl. Neither one thing nor the other as Churchill remarked on a very different occasion. Which is more or less ChatGPT's superpower.
Not bad for a fantasy novel frontispiece, needs more mountains. Or cowbell, I don't know.
Antiqueight@cstross I kinda like LondoGrl though. Sounds like a fic based login...
Chris Beattie@cstross “logic dictates that Down must be at the bottom” 😆
@cstross
You can shorten that to simply "Do not trust ChatGPT" with no loss of accuracy.
You can shorten that to simply "Do not trust ChatGPT" with no loss of accuracy.
Orion (he/him)@cstross When I show stuff like this to "AI" boosters, their response is, "Sure, right, that's terrible, but you're asking it to do something it's not good at! Let's focus on what it *is* good at!"
To which I respond: The thing it's "good" at is lying with confidence. Which isn't, like, actually *good*.