I know this is hardly news any more, but here is a particularly spectacular example of a Large Language model (“artificial intelligence”) making mistake after mistake.

Prompted by a post on Mastodon (which, like all Mastodon posts, I can no longer find), I asked ChatGPT to tell me about my own papers. The response started out well but quickly got much worse. I will indent my comments on its response. Q. What are some articles written by Michael P. Taylor? A. Michael P. Taylor is a vertebrate paleontologist and open science advocate.

I recently discovered the blog Slime Mold Time Mold, which is largely about the science of obesity — a matter of more than academic interest to me, and if I may say to, to Matt. I discovered SMTM through its fascinating discussions of scurvy and citrus-fruit taxonomy.

I’m sure you’ve seen things like ChatGPT in the news: programs that can carry out pretty convincing conversations. They are known as Large Language Models (LLMs) and are frequently referred to as being Artificial Intelligence (AI) — but I really don’t like that designation as it implies some understanding.

Matt and I are writing a paper about Barosaurus cervicals (yes, again). Regular readers will recall that the best Barosaurus cervical material we have ever seen was in a prep lab for Western Paleo Labs.

It is said that, some time around 1590 AD, Galileo Galilei dropped two spheres of different masses from the Leaning Tower of Pisa[1], thereby demonstrating that they fell at the same rate. This was a big deal because it contradicted Aristotle’s theory of gravity, in which objects are supposed to fall at a speed proportional to their mass.

What if I told you that when Matt was in BYU collections a while ago, he stumbled across a cervical vertebra — one labelled DM/90 CVR 3+4, say — that looked like this in anterior view?

In the last post, I catalogued some of the reasons why Scientific Reports , in its cargo-cult attempts to ape print journals such as its stablemate Nature , is an objectively bad journal that removes value from the papers submitted to it: the unnatural shortening that relagates important material into supplementary information, the downplaying of methods, the tiny figures that ram unrelated illustrations into compound images, the

Heinrich Mallison sent me this amazing photo, which he found unattributed on Facebook: {.alignnone .size-full .wp-image-17034 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“17034” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2020/01/27/shoebills-lie-and-its-disgusting/facebook_1579720176756/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2020/01/facebook_1579720176756.jpg” orig-size=“1080,1093” comments-opened=“1”

Okay, so here on the Best Coast it’s not technically my birthday for another 3 hours, but SV-POW! runs on England time, and at the SV-POW! global headquarters bunker it’s already June 3. Oh, and tomorrow Brian and I are driving to New Mexico to look for Cretaceous monsters with Andrew McDonald and crew, and I won’t be advantageously situated for blogging. So here’s my Favorite. Card.