I Asked ChatGPT to Solve an 800-Year-Old Italian Mystery. What Happened Surprised Me.

[marble falls]

I Asked ChatGPT to Solve an 800-Year-Old Italian Mystery. What Happened Surprised Me.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/22/opinion/ai-florence-baptistery.html

By Elon Danziger

Mr. Danziger is an independent art historian based in Florence, Italy.

-snip-

After years of poring over historical documents and reading voraciously, I made an important discovery that was published last year: The baptistery was built not by Florentines but for Florentines — specifically, as part of a collaborative effort led by Pope Gregory VII after his election in 1073. My revelation happened just before the explosion of artificial intelligence into public consciousness, and recently I began to wonder: Could a large language model like ChatGPT, with its vast libraries of knowledge, crack the mystery faster than I did?

So as part of a personal experiment, I tried running three A.I. chatbots — ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini — through different aspects of my investigation. I wanted to see if they could spot the same clues I had found, appreciate their importance and reach the same conclusions I eventually did. But the chatbots failed. Though they were able to parse dense texts for information relevant to the baptistery’s origins, they ultimately couldn’t piece together a wholly new idea. They lacked essential qualities for making discoveries.

There are a few reasons for this. Large language models have read more text than any human could ever hope to. But when A.I. reads text, it’s merely picking up patterns. Peculiar details, outlier data and unusual perspectives that can influence thinking can get lost. Without eccentric or contrarian ideas, I never would have made my discoveries. For example, in his 2006 book “Toscana Romanica,” Guido Tigler, a professor at the University of Florence, argued the baptistery was built later than generally believed. It’s an idea that’s not widely accepted, and I believe that’s the reason the chatbots never presented it to me when I asked them what they would read to solve the enigma of the baptistery. Although I ultimately found reason to reject the later dating, Mr. Tigler’s unorthodox ideas taught me to more strongly consider the possibility that past scholarship had gotten the timeline for the baptistery wrong.

And here’s the deeper problem: Sometimes pattern recognition, human and machine, is wrong. Though there was no confirming evidence, most scholars had simply assumed the patrons of the baptistery were Florentine. After all, a vast majority of church building in the Middle Ages was driven by local people: bishops, abbots, wealthy families. But from my readings I began to agree more and more with a fringe view that the inhabitants of 11th-century Florence were still too poor and provincial to produce such an accomplished building.

-snip-

[bucolic_frolic]

1. Data Dump bots can't reason like humans

Who could have guessed?

[Tetrachloride]

2. we are in the early stages of AI.

[paleotn]

4. Is that like fusion power?

In 20 years!!!! Breakthroughs are just around the corner!!! I've lived through two of those 20 year cycles since I hit the workforce full time, and billions of dollars later still no viable fusion power plants and nothing on the horizon. Perhaps not a perfect analogy, but generally speaking, perhaps it is.

In my mind, AI will prove a useful tool, but just another tool, and the wild claims will never come to fruition because they never, ever do. Paperless office anyone? Flying cars! That's not being a Luddite. That's being observant and practical, looking at both the promise and the challenges. This crazed "build out" the last few years may very well prove to be the greatest waste of capital resources in human history. They've yet to prove that anyone will pay serious money for it or that it will save serious money. End of the day, that's the measuring stick.

[Renew Deal]

3. The points about Gen AI are correct

It’s basically a regurgitator. It can create new insights but not new facts.

[hunter]

5. They are plagiarism machines...

...disguising the works of others as "their" own. But there is no "their" there in the machine.

It's fundamentally a deception, a clever-sleight-of-hand, that has got a lot of people fooled.

I wouldn't trust a heavy user of AI to actually know anything.