[OzEclipse (Joe Cali)]

I have been working with Terry Cuttle on a series of articles about solar eclipses and the 5 Australian eclipses for the AAQ website.

I have mostly been doing a lot of proofing and editing of Terry's articles. Terry asked me to write a 3-page article on eclipse photography. Easy I thought. Well no as it turns out. I ran into what you might call "reverse writers' block," or perhaps, "writers' verbose diarrhoea."

My first draft was a whopping 17 pages. I viciously edited it down and I only got it down to 9 pages then I stalled and could cut no more.

So, I asked ChatGPT to write the article for me. So, I asked, "How do I photograph a total solar eclipse?"

Interesting exercise. It produced a succinct, fairly well-written, 1-page article. However, it was riddled with factual errors, omissions of critical info, and bad advice. It made an excellent starting point for me to correct the errors, omissions, and bad advice, and then turn it into the short article I needed to produce.

It basically told you to use a solar filter then gave instructions how to underexpose the partial eclipse by about 5 stops. Then it failed to tell you to remove the filter for totality, just to “check the live view and adjust the exposure settings accordingly.” Hmmm, with a solar filter left in place, you need a 16 minute exposure to record the corona.

I corrected the errors, fixed the most egregious omissions, then added some of my diagrams and a few extra bits of advice and voila, I had a 4-page article.

There is a lot of debate in the education sector about whether students will be able to get away with cheating using these tools. From what I have seen, the accuracy is about as accurate as a feature written by one of the writers on space.com. For a longer student assignment on a subject like history, if the error ratio is as bad as the drivel I got out of it, teachers have nothing to worry about. It is nonetheless a very useful tool in the right hands and used with suitably expert human oversight.

I am including a screen shot here of the original ChatGPT article draft with my comments for your amusement: