Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog

In August I was planning for my participation in the ICTSS conference in Bergamo, Italy, and wanted to find some accommodation within walking distance of the conference place. Bergamo has a medieval “città alta”, high city, at the top of a hill, and a “città bassa”, low city, down in the valley, where modern expansion happens. I had only passed through Bergamo once before but enough to know that it is not that easy or fast to commute between the two parts, so it is better to plan your accommodation properly.

It was not immediately clear from the online map where the conference venue belonged, so I thought that maybe this was an opportunity to find some actual use for ChatGPT. (So far I am not a great fan, see here, but one has to keep one’s mind open.) I asked my question:

and received an answer (here is the first part):

Good that I did not stop here because the answer is plain wrong; the Piazzale in question (the main site of the university, and a former convent, as I later found out) is in the high city. Even more interesting was the second part of the answer:

Now this is really good. With my Southern California experience I am not that easily surprised: it is a common joke in Santa Barbara (an area prone to mudslides, particularly when it rains after a fire) that you might go to bed in your house at the top of a hill and wake up the next morning in the same house but with a whole new set of neighbors at the bottom of a valley. The other way around, though, is quite new for me.

AI-induced levitation! Of an entire city area! Since September 2021, the Piazzale San Agostino and its historic university buildings might have moved up 250 meters from low to high city. Artificial Intelligence is so amazing.

As a codicil to this little report: at that point I had decided to drop this absurd tool and look for a reliable source, but noticed that I had made a mistake in the Italian phrase: the name of high city is “città alta”, whereas I had put the words in the reverse order (as shown above). Since I like to do things right I asked the question again with the proper order, not changing anything else, not questioning the previous results, just repeating the question with a correct phrasing:

and got this:

The amazement continues. I had not complained, not questioned the answer, not emitted any doubt or criticism, and here is this tool apologizing again. And leaving me with two exactly contradictory answers. Which one am I supposed to believe? If I ask again, am I going to get a new set of excuses and a reversal to the original answer? (I did not try.)

I will continue my quest to find out whatever this thing might be good for.