Pushing back on my flight from NYC to IAD, I caught one last headline before powering down the computer in my palm. This, from OpenAI:  

Hum, “Education” or “OpenAI’s Education”... The headline felt worrisome given the total ‘fail’ experience I just had with ChatGPT, during a MoMa guided tour, the evening before, when I used it to augment my educational experience.

A masterful art expert, Agnes Berecz, had just led us through works of Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner, Yente (Eugenia Crenovich), Louise Bourgeois, and Joan Mitchell.

Then we stopped to view this piece by Niki de Saint Phalle:

I was using the ChatGPT App as a companion during the tour because the human tour guide had mesmerizing knowledge of details of each artist, their style, inspiration, and wider impact on the art scene of the times. I wanted to hoover it all up. 

I jotted notes on my phone and also shot queries into ChatGPT, to further dig for nuggets that could add to my knowledge.  

Now, we all know ChatGPT can ‘get it wrong’, but it’s all too delightful to not lean on it and expect rightness.

I fed the photo into ChatGPT (in part, to log the artist’s name and spelling correctly).

What unfolded was a shocking reminder that no matter how spectacularly confident outputs read, you must keep your critical brain switched ‘on’!

ChatGPT responded with crediting the artwork to Robert Rauschenberg, not Niki de Saint Phalle.

Had it really just attributed a work hanging in the MoMa to the wrong Artist?  

It had. 

So I chose a prompt to suggest a sense-check.

Next, this output reponse:

For now and on so many levels, Agnes as teacher far exceeds the machine.

At BIML, we are pushing on the topic of Recursive Pollution as a very real thing.

If it plays out, the museum of the future may be full of Mona Lisas.