ChatGPT: Talking with the Chatman About Geography

So I finally tried the famous, world-changing ChatGPT. Wow! What utter BS!

So— over many long evenings I had searched for a geographic task that ChatGPT could do. On the last night it offered to label an aerial photo with everything that it could identify. Open these in tabs to compare:

• The original aerial photo

• ChatGPT, having offered to label it unaltered

• ChatGPT, having sworn it would leave it unaltered this time

I wasn't surprised that it botched every label; I was surprised that for no reason it garbled the photo into meaninglessness. And its final, more realistic version was somehow even more disturbing, like Nineteen Eighty-Four without Winston's skill. Geor Geor Badly.

I thought, wow-- it can't not lie. So I decided to ask it-- not just about this photo but about the whole many evenings:

Wow! BS about its own BS! HyperBS!

Continued next week. An amazing album, by the way, named for a good poem. And of the two images: "The people who told us that two and two is ten are now trying to tell us that two and two is five." ChatGPT: Wikipedia. Photo: Faribault, Minnesota. Geor: Google search. A Google Gooseegg! Amazing: Billy Bragg, Talking with the Taxman About Poetry, 1986. Good: Vladimir Mayakovsky, 1926. This: Billy Bragg, “North Sea Bubble,” 1991. Robert Wellman Campbell, "ChatGPT: Talking with the Chatman About Geography," RSS Longa, 4 September 2025, public domain via CC0 1.0.