When I was a child, I often wondered how a fish could be so dumb as to be fooled by artificial baits and lures.
Later, I learned that it was just the fish’s nature to bite hard on anything that looked like the real thing.
I recently asked ChatGPT, the Artificial Intelligence created by OpenAI, to give me a brief history of Cassville, Missouri. This is what it cast out: Cassville, Missouri is a city located in Barry County, Missouri. It was founded in 1845 and was named after Lewis Cass, a prominent political figure of the time. Cassville was an important stop along the Butterfield Overland Mail stagecoach route in the mid-19th century, connecting Missouri to California. During the Civil War, the city was a Union stronghold, and it experienced significant growth and development in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a center of agriculture and commerce. Today, Cassville remains a small city with a strong sense of community, preserving its historical heritage while also growing and adapting to meet the needs of its residents.
Obviously, the Artificial Intelligence has yet to read Emory Melton’s book “The First 150 Years in Cassville Missouri 1845-1995” or it would have mentioned that in addition to being a “Union stronghold” Cassville was also the temporary seat of the Missouri confederate government in 1861.
Perhaps the machine learning was just being diplomatic by attempting to avoid characterization that might be controversial. Likewise, DALL·E 2, the image generating Artificial Intelligence also from OpenAI, wouldn’t generate images of hillbillies for me since they considered the term derogatory, although I can’t remember meeting anyone in Barry County who was offended by the term.
The C&E Railroad, once declared the world’s shortest standard gauge railroad by Ripley’s Believe It or Not before ceasing operation in 1956, also didn’t make the cut. Neither did the fire of 1893 that destroyed most of the business district along Main Street in Cassville. It seems what is important to the residents of City of Seven Valleys differs from that of the programmers of Silicon Valley. Or perhaps the AI thought the subjects weren’t worth the space. I did ask it to be brief after all.
The rest of the content is basically generic information that would be true for most towns. Pretty much all towns still in existence experienced significant growth during the 19th and 20th centuries. What small city doesn’t have a “strong sense of community” and who doesn’t want to believe that their town is “growing and adapting?”
This description seems more like a mentalist trick of predicting what’s in the lady’s purse at a magic show rather than a 21st-century revolution.
The future use of AI in our lives may be inevitable. The car replaced the horse and buggy, the tractor replaced the mule, and the computer replaced the typewriter. If there is money to be saved or made, then businesses will integrate machine intelligence into our daily activities whether we wish it or not.
I wonder now if the lure of AI is too great for human nature to resist. If the quote “History is Written by Victors” (attributed to Winston Churchill, but also stated by Missouri Senator George Graham Vest in an 1891 Kansas City newspaper article) is true, then when machines start writing our history, I guess that means humanity lost. I hope in the future we don’t bite too hard on Artificial Intelligence and get taken in hook, line, and sinker.
Jeremiah Buntin is a historian at the Barry County Museum. He may be reached at jbuntin@barrycomuseum.org.
