AI graders Prof. Edward Cooke, Sara Offer, Tian Hsu, Dingzhong Ding at WNHH FM. ChatGPT had insight to share with us about an earthenware object in Yale’s art gallery collection. “Holding this brewing pot,” ChatGPT wrote, “connects one with the craftsmanship of Burkina Faso.” One problem: ChatGPT never actually “held” the early 20th century community brewing pot in question. And the craftsmanship it “connected “with? “The robust construction speaks to the advanced kiln technologies and careful labor practices of the early 20th century, highlighting societal values of resourcefulness and community,” the bot wrote. Another problem: It’s unlikely anyone used a kiln, let along advanced kiln tech, to make that pot. Can we then feel confident about the societal values represented. And don’t get me started about what to know about the spider depicted on the pot … I did get Tian Hsu started about the spider and brewing pot. Hsu is a Yale undergraduate who took an art history course taught by Professor Edward Cooke. Cooke asked Hsu and her classmates to pick from among four objects in Yale University Art Gallery’s collection, then have ChatGPT write a label of up to 150 words to tell viewers about the objects. The labels matter. They enable visitors to a museum to learn basic information and context to help us understand and think about the objects on display. To help us understand or, like ChatGPT , “connect” with the art. Who writes the labels matters. Just as who writes news articles or poems or books or medical reports or research papers or legal briefs matters. Artifical intelligence (AI) is rapidly taking over much of that work in law, medicine, journalism, fiction, music. Professor Cooke assigned his students to test out how that might work in crafting those museum labels. He and three of the students — Hsu, Dingzhong Ding, Sara Offer — discussed their findings Thursday during a conversation on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program. The students fed the “tombstone” details (title, derivation, age, genre) about their objects to a ChatGPT bot on Yale’s licensed AI platform. They asked the bot to craft a label, suggesting that it describe both the objects’ qualities and their significance. They followed up with rounds of questions to refine the write-ups before submitting to Cooke a final fourth ChatGPT-generated label along with their own critiques. In the end, ChatGPT failed to impress. It simply made up the kiln part, for instance, said Hsu. A quick online search suggests why: A general Google search about use of kiln in Burkina Faso yields an AI overview (with supported links) about widespread use of kilns and furnaces dating back centuries. But closer inspection shows that that refers to iron smelting. A more specific search about their use for ceramics (like the community brewing pot in question) reveals that people in Burkina Faso used bonfires or open-air pits, not enclosed kilns to create clay pots. The bot didn’t at first mention the spider — the central image on the pot — in its initial write-up at Hsu’s command. She asked it to address the significance of the spider. ChatGPT complied. Sort of. “Decorative motifs, such as the spider, symbolize creativity and patience in Burkinabé culture. These symbols encourage close inspection, revealing cultural narratives embedded in the pot’s design,” it wrote. Hsu wasn’t buying. She was already unimpressed with the bot’s vocabulary. (“It said the word ‘culture’ at least four times That’s already a red flag.”) She started looking up and readers papers on arachnidan symbolic meanings in art. She found useful papers through the J-Star research portal, including PDFs that she wonders whether ChatGPT would have accessed. “There are the more specific meanings of a spider, such as intelligence, cunning and intermediary,” she concluded. “It seems like the spider is an intermediary between worlds. It also symbolizes resistance, intelligence, cunning.” The shortcomings in AI’s pot labels derive in part from that initial false claim about “holding” the pot, Cooke argued: Bots can’t touch and feel objects. Touching and feeling are essential tools in assessing “different kinds of evidence,” he argued. “AI can’t replicate … that kind of personal dimension.” Just as the “ability to be discerning, to sort through information” is essential to draw conclusions and determine accuracy of deep-dive data collection. So he believes that the students who joined him on air will have meaningful curatorial jobs to pursue in the AI age. He does believe that AI will play a role in how they do their jobs. It will be one “tool” to help gather lots of information that skilled humans can then call on their thinking, touching, and emotional and visual skills to process and discover meaning. Click on the video at the top of the story to watch the full conversation on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” with Yale art history Professor Edward S. Cooke Jr. and students Sara Offer, Tian Hsu, Dingzhong Ding. Click here to subscribe or here to listen to other episodes of “Dateline New Haven.” The post AI Bot Claimed It Touched This Pot appeared first on New Haven Independent. ...read more read less