AI-generated word salad: Trilobite ≈ Oyster

Wired today had an interesting article on software that can create “fake text news”, released by two coders who created it on the cheap after an initial version had been deemed too dangerous to release (https://www.wired.com/story/dangerous-ai-open-source/).  The story had a link to another web program which will create AI driven text (https://talktotransformer.com/).

This I had to try.  My prompt is in bold below, and the program delivered text “completes” my thought.  I was most impressed that the AI brought in trilobites, my favorites animal after the heliocplacoids, but the luster wore off when the trilobites were compared to oysters (my boss’s favorite animal).  Overall the AI produced a great word salad—the Archean is about 100 times older than what the AI says, the middle Paleolithic about 4-10 times older, and so on.  Minor quibbles.  But with politicians now content with speaking word salads with little regard for the facts, AI can probably produce text that puts the politicians to shame.  We won’t need speech writers any more.

Fossils represent one of the most important and significant discoveries of mankind," it said.

Called Eudyptes atrodon and from the Greek for "great atelier," fossils were discovered in the Upper Archean of the Nile, an estimated 30 million years ago. Some of the fossils were so large it was thought they came from a meteorite. They had been so well preserved they were nicknamed "dinosaur eggs," though they were later found to have no skeleton, and their skin was pale, gray and even "blue" in some places. Eudyptes was more than 80 feet (25 m) long and weighed up to 600 tons.

Fossils of all kinds were discovered in the region, including ammonites, sponges, sharks, a trilobite (like an oyster) and a bird skeleton.

The find could have significant implications for the Middle Paleolithic of the area, the researchers said.

"The Middle Paleolithic probably took place between 11,500 and 9,500 cal B.P. (Before Present

--thanks to https://talktotransformer.com/ for completing my thought so elegantly.