Reflections on AI, Boats, and Father's Day

I've spent the last few weeks digging deeply into agents. Three months after embarking on the Azrius Analytics adventure, I feel like I'm finally getting below the surface in working with LLM models, especially image processing. As of tomorrow, I'm also gainfully employed, so I'll have less time to pursue my own interests.

I'm disappointed with AI's ability to process and analyze images. I'm willing to say that my photos are a part of it. When I take photos for AI input in the future, I will focus on single-subject photos very closely. They do much better with better quality photos (no surprise).

That's how I initially became so excited, I was able to take a close-up photo of the church bulletin that I then lost, and I wanted to save the poem that another member shared as part of the service..

When I wanted to share it with my kids for Father's Day, I had ChatGPT do a word-for-word transcription based on the image. I couldn't find it online because the poet is local (though excellent) and comes from a generation before the ubiquity of online materials.

It was written by a local poet, Rick Richards, and it spoke to me because I'm at this conflicted time when my duties as a father are subsiding. I'm still needed, but not required, the way I was before my kids were adults.

Blessing the Boats - by Rick Richards It is not a blessing of the fleet,
There is no fleet, only boats.
And the boats are not blessed together,
Each boat is blessed until
All the boats are blessed,
Wholly blessed, all rocking together. And each boat is blessed,
Not as some magical protection
From fate or weather’s fury,
But as a reminder that the ocean
And sky and wind and weather
Love each boat.
Love is not protection,
It is something better. Love is not protection,
It is a reminder that whatever happens
With the ocean, sky, wind, and weather
Does not come from malice.
It happens, it may destroy a boat
And all those aboard,
But not for the purpose of harming
Anyone or anything.
That is the blessing. This is a hard thing to keep in mind,
So, boats are blessed every year.

The transcribing was perfect - I had my phone close up to the image, took it, and the AI could recreate the words perfectly. I suppose then I cannot be entirely at fault for believing I could assemble a catalog of little libraries by taking photographs. Here's what I get when I try to have Claude Haiku 3 build a virtual catalog from a photo of a little library.

A Little Library

According to Claude, here's what it contains:

Here are the details I can discern:

Book Titles and Authors:
1. "The Martian" by Andy Weir
2. "The Science of Interstellar" by Kip Thorne
3. "A People's History of the United States" by Howard Zinn
4. "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" by Annie Dillard
5. "Siddhartha" by Hermann Hesse
6. "East of Eden" by John Steinbeck
7. "The Federalist Papers" by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay
8. "Dune" by Frank Herbert
9. "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair
10. "The Art of War" by Sun Tzu
11. "Moby-Dick" by Herman Melville
12. "Slaughterhouse-Five" by Kurt Vonnegut


Please let me know if you need any clarification or have additional images you'd like me to analyze.

Those are all books, but not one is in the Little Library. ChatGPT does a little better, so there is hope for training and refining AIs to do better.

[
  {
    "title": "The Path of Daggers",
    "author": "Robert Jordan"
  },
  {
    "title": "Out of Africa",
    "author": "Isak Dinesen"
  },
  {
    "title": "No Limits",
    "author": "Arnold Schwarzenegger"
  },
  {
    "title": "The House of Hades",
    "author": "Rick Riordan"
  }
]

Only four books were found, but there were no hallucinations, so it was much better. Anyways, it shows there is much work to be done on this problem.