Librarians use one weird trick to destroy ChatGPT
Sorry about the headline, but this is an interesting story about the place of human problem solving and expertise.
Kendall Hall Rotunda from below
The computer has seen some things
Laxson Hall at Chico State is rumored to be haunted and every building seemingly has a secret to tell. Last week some colleagues and I were shown around some areas of Kendall Hall (the primary administration building) that are mainly used for storage. The rotunda area under the dome looks like a classroom frozen in time complete with chalkboards, ancillary rooms, and corridors that seemingly go to nowhere. It was interesting, but I was truly fascinated by the basement. Looking around we encountered a PC workstation from the 80s, something that looked like a bank vault, and a host of other oddities. On our way out we found an old ceremonial banner. We are curious people so we unfurled it and none of us recognized it. I asked a coworker to take a picture and confidently stated “I’ll have an answer for us by the end of the night” as I planned on uploading it to the Dall-E3 enabled version of ChatGPT.
Later that evening I uploaded the photo and got…not much. Ever asked a group of students about something you know they should know and the response is a sea of faces. Not angry or confused, just indifferent? That is the initial response I got from ChatGPT. Undeterred, I lightened the photo and pressed the program for details with prompts and hypotheticals like “this was stored for a long time, consider what this might have been before the colors faded” and “take a moment and think deeply about this.”
Lightened Flag
After starting with “this design does not directly match any internationally recognized national flag. It could be a custom or ceremonial flag, a historical flag, or a flag from a specific organization or group” the program eventually landed on the possibility of German influence. It also strongly recommended contacting the library or a historical society.
I would have left it there, but my supervisor was interested in what the archivists had to say so I passed it to the Dean of the Library who had two of the excellent librarians look into it. Their results were amazing. They figured out the flag was that of Zambia and then went further to uncover a relationship the nation had with Chico State going back to at least the 1960s evidenced by two old campus articles about a farm visit and a broader tour from November 1966. It did not take them long to uncover all this and I was blown away by the depth of their response.
The whole experience was illuminating for me. It made me appreciate the expertise and value of our excellent librarians at the University even more. It also made me think about the current limitations of the technology. Identifying the Zambian flag is something I thought the program would have been able to do. Later I returned to the thread and asked ChatGPT if it could be the flag of Zambia and it responded affirmatively, especially if the colors had faded. This combination of expertise, institutional knowledge, and problem solving appears to be firmly in the domain of humans for now. We carry with us the ability to pull together different ideas and strands to solve mysteries in a way that is currently beyond artificial intelligence. That might change in the coming months or years, but for now–librarians for the win!