[Tweeters] ChatGPT and eBird

[Michael Hobbs]

Tweets - As you should have guessed, my post yesterday about eBird teaming
up with ChatGPT was an April Fools joke.  But I thought I should share with
you how I "wrote" the post.

I signed into ChatGPT and gave it the prompt "Write an announcement that
eBird.org will use ChatGPT to make predictive bird lists".

That's all I gave it. I didn't tell the AI what eBird was, what kind of
data they had, nor what kind of bird lists might be of interest. All of
that was produced by ChatGPT in about two seconds, from the information and
"understanding" it already had gleaned from the internet.

I did have ChatGPT generate two versions, and I did substitute one
paragraph from the second draft into the first. I also added the sentence
at the end, boasting that ChatGPT wrote the announcement. Because it did.

It is almost guaranteed that within a few years, eBird *will *be using AI
to help extract and present data from eBird to birders, so this wasn't so
much an April Fools joke as a prediction of near-future events.

I would also like to mention that, last Thursday, I told Matt that I had *tried
*to get ChatGPT to generate a predictive Marymoor Park report for March
29th, using the 15 years of weekly reports at
www.marymoor.org/summaries/Week13.htm, and that I was disappointed that
ChatGPT had not been able to do this. But ChatGPT is a general-purpose
tool. The underlying technology could easily be trained to do this task.

I will not, however, *ever* substitute a predictive survey result for the
real thing. My survey grew out of my birding, but the goal has always been
to go birding.

So stop reading this drivel and go out birding!

= Michael Hobbs
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