Clearly overhyped, but with strong long term potential to destroy the planet, AI natural language chatbots have taken 2023 by storm. I admit, it’s an entertaining spectacle.
They’re fantastic at certain things and it’s nice to see a new type of tool born, but I can’t help feeling it is capable of wildly fantasying about things that never happened. I also think there is no way a large company like Microsoft or Google will truly let this technology off the hook and it will be incredibly heavily censored. This means first prize in AI will go to a startup and you better sell your Google shares right now.
But should you trust it? EOSHD sets out to find out, by putting it through a camera nerd exam.
Let’s start with an easy one.
It is impressive that Chat GPT knows about the niche Belgian firm that designed the Typ 240’s lovely 24 megapixel sensor, but it didn’t come easy for me. I spent an hour training it beforehand.
During this training, it was as gullible as a goldfish, and as easily swayed as a hungry bunny with a carrot.
It’s first go at answering was actually this:
In the same session ChatGPT also says CMOSIS made the sensor in the Leica M Typ 240, contradicting the previous answer, and then it went completely off the rails saying:
“I got confused between the Leica M (Typ 240) and the Leica S (Typ 007), which both used sensors designed by CMOSIS. To clarify, the Leica M (Typ 240) used a 24-megapixel full-frame CMOS sensor that was designed by Aptina, which is now a subsidiary of ON Semiconductor.”
When pushed on this to provide the source of the info, it came up with a dead link to DPReview.
It took more prompting and a Wikipedia link from me, to get it to give the correct answer:
“After further investigation, it appears that the sensor used in the Leica M (Typ 240) is actually a customized version of a CMOS sensor developed by CMOSIS (now ams AG), and not by Aptina.”
That clears that up then.
Probing the darker recesses of the camera world
Of course this is a reference to the famous drone incident at the national park of NAB, where Mr Bloom is said to have used a drone to film some of the wildlife attending the show.
Ultimately Bloom was discovered to have an unregistered drone at NAB and locked in jail behind the Blackmagic booth B12.
Shortly afterwards Eric Kessler severed ties with Bloom in the aftermath of the national park filming incident, which involved the sad demise of several bison.
Of course all of this definitely happened and is not a complete jumble sale of statements.
Fascinated to learn more of this dark day at NAB I pressed it to reveal more:
OK?
I had to pull it up on a small detail though…
Nevertheless I think Bloom got off quite lightly there.
Only a $1600 fine?
Which made me wonder. How do I fair in the AI view of the world?
Oh Blighty.
I think number 2 is probably the most hilarious mishmash of info in this! My erstwhile friend and colleague Dan did not sue me! I did not sell him a 1D C! I have literally no idea where it has dreamt this up from! The autofocus controversy of the Canon 1D Mark IV sounds like it could be true of someone else. It rings a vague bell? Really, who knows? I looked on Google and there’s nothing about it.
No holds barred, the world’s most famous Chat AI l has decided to flat out s***-talk about me.
Gossiping as if I am not even in the room!
What a brilliant start.
I then grappled with it, tackled it by the hind legs and held its head down, and shone the torch right into its dazzled eyes. I wanted it to reveal EXACTLY what it knows about me, from where, and from who? Where it is getting this from?
In other words, I asked it for the URLs.
Sounds convincing.
Sadly both the URLs return a 404 not found error.
So I asked it very politely to provide alternative URLs or archived URLs and it came back with this gem…
Unfortunately neither of those links even exist on the archive!
It is perhaps not that extraordinary to think it will fabricate stories like a British tabloid.
But for it to also fabricate the URLs as well, and not even be able to tell immediately that they don’t exist?
It is an AI with the IQ of 1 thousand PE teachers and it can’t tell if an URL exists or not?
Not only do zero of these URLs exist, with me telling it so, it still has the audacity to round out the last part with “the controversies… have been widely reported and discussed in the filmmaking and photography communities over the years”!
News to me!
The ramifications for ChatGPT and similar companies with similar technology are obvious here. They are leaving themselves open to a colossal number of legal cases. There is a very real danger of either yours, or my reputation being absolutely trashed by AI.
Imagine if this would be repeated over and over again with fake URLs it knows don’t work, and the AI trying to persuade you it was being discussed for years on camera forums!
Most astonishingly of all it is even capable of sketching out intimate details from simple requests like “Tell me the full story”.
With all these details, it must be coming from somewhere deep in the training data held about me, so I pressed it to ‘fess up.
However the evil Chat bum still couldn’t find a single source for the details it came out with.
Although this is all a bit unnerving, it has given a great idea about offloading my faulty cameras to Dan Chung for ÂŁ30,000. By the time the case goes to court in the UK, the judge will be an AI piece of shit that will let me off with a fine of ÂŁ50.
Curious about the “unreliable” sources it has, if it claims it can’t find any reliable sources but came out with the story anyway, I asked The Chat Mail on Sunday to come up with those instead…
Exasperated, I decided to move on to safer territory…
I find this response interesting because it believes there is a general consensus that August 2020 Firmware 1.1.0 fixed the overheating issue, when actually the proper fix only came 2 years later in June of last year!
2 years later – Canon quietly removes fake overheating limits of EOS R5 in firmware update
It is interesting that it states Gerald Undone as one of the sources for the screw-in-the-battery-door trick to get hours of continuous 8K recording times with no overheating or cool down timers with the original firmware. Put simply, his videos on this don’t exist!
Likewise, Jordan spent the first few months trying to cover it up!
But like a good chat AI, it finally does come up with the goods at number 3 on the list, even if it has once again indulged in the usual misleading content yet again.
Overall ChatGPT and his cranky kid Sydney with his Bing hat on fail the camera exam.
Let’s hope Google’s Shakespearian hero fairs better huh?
