Behind the Scenes Minis: Dicey Sources

Tracy shares struggles that she encountered pulling together this edition of Unearthed. She and Holly have a tangential discussion about AI.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Tracey V. Wilson
and I'm Holly Frye. We talked about Unearthed all week
long this week, Yeah, which is pretty much just how

(00:21):
on Earth works Now. I felt like I struggled a
little bit pulling this one together. Yeah, for a number
of reasons. One was that what I used to do,
I would go through my whole bookmark manager of things
I had bookmarked to potentially talk about in Unearthed, and

(00:42):
I would go through them, and as I found ones
that were interesting, I would write them up into the episode.
And over the years I have shifted to I go
through all of those links and the bookmark manager and
I make one file that's the stuff I'm pretty sure
is going to make it into the episode, and I
make another file that is maybe stuff to go into

(01:04):
the episode. But I don't actually start typing anything up
until I have made a whole pass of all of
the bookmarks. Gotcha. As I was doing that this time,
I was like, Wow, I am making good time with this.
I am going through them at a good clip. I
am on task and doing well. And then when I

(01:26):
went to step two to turn this thing into like
a more workable episode. I realized I had just miscategorized
some stuff in my haste. The section that we had
about smells I thought was going to be longer than
it was. I thought I had five or six things
that were about smells. One of them I had noted

(01:50):
as being about a first century Cologne No, it was
about a dig of a first century site in the
city of Cologne that had nothing to do with aroma.
I think that's a fair accident when you're quickly filing
zipping through stuff. A couple of the other ones, like

(02:10):
just either turned out to be really confusing. One of
them was something like all of them turned out to
be simultaneously under the umbrellas of smells and updates, And
one of them was something we actually really had talked
about that exact thing before. It was not new information,
So the smells section became short. I also, I have

(02:32):
tried to be more aware of whether something that I'm
reading might be generative AI oh yeah, created, And that's
been the case for a while. And this is the
first time that I have cut stuff from the episode
either because the AI disclosure, like there was an AI

(02:55):
disclosure on the paper that made me go, oh, I
don't that was not okay, And then in one case
the entire conclusion it was basically like, yeah, so we
asked we asked AI to write what the rules for
this board game probably were, and I was like, that's okay,

(03:18):
I could I could ask AI what the rules for
the board game probably were. So I cut that. I'm
trying not to climb on my AI soapbox and be
really irritated I have. So there have been times on
the show before the development of large language model chatbots, yeah,

(03:39):
where we have talked about things that were connected to
something under the umbrella of AI or machine learning, right,
And a lot of them have had to do with
like there was one that was like, with the permission
of the traditional owners, drones being sent into caves where

(04:00):
there might be rock art and an algorithm helping to
detect rock art that the human I might not be
able to detect on its own, Yeah, and that being
like the preliminary step for the researchers to then like
look at that and work with the traditional owners to
interpret the artwork. There are like uses of machine learning

(04:24):
that are cool and interesting, but then when you get
into things that are like and so we asked a
chatbot what the rules for this game might have been.
I was out. I was like, Nope, that's not that's
not what I'm here for. I mean, here's my thing.
I don't love AI because of how much theft is done.

(04:46):
But yeah, even on a bigger issue, I hope you
don't want your kids to have clean water, Like, It's
just AI is really environmentally a disaster. Yeah, and I
know there are some companies in that space trying to
figure out ways to mitigate it. But as they try
to figure it out, a kajillion people asking chat gpt

(05:08):
for casserole recipes are doing so much damage. Like, I
don't know that we'll ever catch up, So I get
very frustrated. Yeah. One of the things that I'm frustrated by, Well,
there's the thing that is people either asking chat gpt
something that you also could have just put into a

(05:30):
search engine and there would have been a high quality
first result you could have read for yourself. There's that
there is the number of absolutely laughably wrong things that
AI summaries of search results have presented me. With being
a person that plays video games, I've seen so many
people show up in video games subreddits being like I'm

(05:53):
really confused about what to do. I asked AI and
it said this, and like what the AI has told
them about video game is flatly wrong. Yeah, and human
beings wrote a whole walk through, so that's what you
could have done. So like all of that stuff is
frustrating to me deeply, and like these are not good

(06:13):
uses of technology. They're not good uses of the resource
behind the technology. But then the fact that everything that
relates to machine learning and algorithms and that, like it's
all been lumped together under the umbrella of AI. So
it's really hard to like talk about any of these
things in a way that makes sense, because like, sometimes

(06:37):
there are things that are not using they like they
don't have the electricity and water usage concerns that generative
AI large language models do, but because they are lumped
under the umbrella of AI, like people hear about them
and immediately are upset and all of it is the

(06:58):
mess it is It is the fact that models have
been trained on work that was protected by copyright. That's
a big mess problem. The fact that so many things
that we have to use in our daily lives now
have an AI layer that we cannot turn off or
get away from. A hate. Yeah, I like how we
just definitely veered into the that's a planned to have

(07:23):
an AI conversation. But here we are. Here we are.
I have lots of art thoughts. When you're ready, Okay,
I have two other things I had noted doubt, and
then we will get to art. The first is the
descriptions of the vile that contained fecal matter and essential oils. Yeah,

(07:43):
gross number one, But the articles that I read about them,
I felt that a number of writers used adjectives that
were unnecessary and just made reading about it grosser. And
I was like, I didn't need that evocative additional word there.
We could have just left that out right. So I

(08:04):
just tried to write that as straightforwardly but also non
grossly as possible. Another reason that this became a difficult
thing to work on is that, for some reason, for

(08:25):
the first time in years of working on this, I
just forgot to look at all of my unearthed sources
for like a month. I think it was maybe when
we came back from the holidays, I did the I
wrote up the unearthed for the fourth quarter of twenty
twenty five and then my brain just kind of checked
out on Unearthed. And usually it is something that I

(08:48):
look at at least once a week, and I gradually
create this you know, list of links over the course
of the quarter. But I just, I don't know, I
forgot about it for more than a month, and I
came to it and I had I had hundreds of
articles that had kind of backed up, and in the
course of going through them, I locked myself out of

(09:10):
one of the websites that publishes things because I opened
too many pages from them at the same time, and
they thought I was a bot. So I've tried not
to repeat that experience since that happened. Heavens, yes, you
talk about art. I do. First, we was talking about

(09:32):
a thing that's not really art but kind of art
because you mentioned painting closets. Oh yeah, yeah. I used
to be very like, why the heck would you ever
paint a closet? And then I'm going to invoke our
friend Lily once again. Oh I love Lily. We're going
on a trip leader this year. I'm very excited. When
she got her house. You know, we all were kind

(09:53):
of like house planning to purchases and buying around the
same time, like she and several of our other friends,
So there was a lot of painting at each other's houses.
And she was very insistent that we paint the closets.
And I was like, this is a waste of time.
Do you know what? Those closets are beautiful and like
when you look in them, and one is like this
beautiful raspberry color that has like gold trim on it,

(10:16):
and it's the prettiest thing you've ever seen. I'm like, Oh,
we should all be painting our closets anyway, you have
the energy. Yeah, So friends of ours bought a house
and they, you know, had some some painting parties. Friends
came over and helped paint. And what I remember was
like I had painted, I had gone in slightly the

(10:39):
wrong order. I had painted a bunch of walls that
you would see if you opened the door to the closet.
But then I realized I was like, oh, but this
up over here behind me, like that also needs to
be painted. And I had to kind of contort myself
into the clear way. Yeah, and also try not to

(11:01):
get onto the paint that I had already painted. Yeah,
that's just I just had sort of neglected to think
about this one part of the closet wall. But the
process of painting the closet was also just sort of
tedious and awkward enough that the idea of painting a room.
I mean, it's totally possible that room had another purpose

(11:24):
before it was used as storage, but the idea of
painting like figurative elements and cinnabar colored bars on the
interior of the closet, I was like, Nope, that sounds
like a little too much for me. Okay, now we
have to talk about Salvador Dali. Okay, yeah, who I'll
probably never do an episode on because I can't like,

(11:45):
uh huh, it's too much I love. And he's made
a lot of unearthed appearances. He has, he has, We
did a really fun episode about him for Criminalia. This
is not what I intended to talk about. But did
you know that there was a Dolly, an original Dolly
on Rikers Island? For years? I heard about this somewhere.

(12:07):
It might have been from you, it might have been me.
That he had made this piece of art for the
prison because he was supposed to do an appearance there
for like their art program, and he was sick that day,
so he made them a piece of art. It ended
up getting stolen. It's lost forever. We don't know where
it is. I have a weird follow up that is
I will tell you later because I met someone who

(12:29):
claims to know someone who was involved, yeah, in the theft,
even though they all got off Anyway, Here's what I
want to talk about though, the scale of that painting. Yeah,
it was acquired because one of the things if you
go to Saint Petersburg, Florida, and you don't go to
the Dolli Museum, whether you were a fan of his
work or not, you're doing yourself a disservice. For two reasons. One,

(12:53):
I have always contended that if Dolly were not as
out going and flamboyant as he was, and he wanted
to just keep his life on the DL, he could
have been a completely rich art forger. Yeah, because when
he was young, one of the things he did to
learn his skill and to learn technique was to make

(13:16):
copies of famous pieces of work. And they are good copies.
Like he could like we think about his work and
it being you know, his very surrealist stuff, but like
this man could paint you a fake. Sayson and you
wouldn't know the difference. He could paint you at Caravaggio
and you wouldn't know the difference. But what really blows
you away when you're in that space is the scale

(13:37):
of some of his paintings, like Hallucinogenic Torriodor, which is
my possibly my favorite painting on the face of the planet. Well,
just rock you back. It's so big and there's so
much visually to take in that. Now I'm like, I
gotta go. Are they gonna display the because they have to,
because I gotta go. I gotta go. And I'm trying
to think of where they would put it because it's

(13:58):
not an infinitely large music like, it's a good size,
but I'm like, where do you even put something like that?
They'll figure it out. It'll be beautiful. I can't wait.
The second thing I wanted to talk about is that
I'm really excited because I'm going back to Italy, not
for a work trip but with my best friend because
we're going through our art bucket lists, like the things

(14:21):
we want to see in person before we are no
longer on this planet or you know, able to travel.
And one of my big most of this is her
list because I have been more recently than her. But
my big thing that I'm doing on this trip is
I want to compare the Caravaggio Judas laying halo fair
names with the Gentileski. Yeah. I mean, I have looked

(14:46):
at the images before, but I want to see them
in person. You know. Part of it is that, like
Gentileski is like twenty years later than him, there's actually
a slight familial connection between her father and Caravaggio, and
she really you know, took that concept of tenebrism and
like went to a new level with it in some ways.

(15:08):
But also, you know, he was a violent man, we know,
very very prone to outbursts of violence. But I kind
of chuckle because his version of that the women look
a little almost timid about what they're doing, whereas we know,
because we did an episode on Artemisia Gentileski that like,

(15:29):
there are actually two versions of that biblical story that
she's painted. One is the beheading, one is the slaying.
Those are the two titles in there in different places.
I think I'm going to see the beheading hers, which
we know was It has been considered over the years
as a kind of a protest piece of art and
a way to work through her feelings about having been

(15:51):
sexually assaulted like those women are. One of the women
is like kneeling on his chest like it is visceral,
and so I cannot yeah wait to see these two
in person. That's just me wanting to talk about art.

(16:12):
But here's the question I want to ask you, Okay,
because you also have some cool travel coming up. Are
you going to go see the Elgin Marbles at the
British Museum while you're in London? I don't know. We
we have not planned anything other than we have plane tickets.
We have a hotel for part of the stay because

(16:35):
we are going because Patrick is going to be at
an event. So that like that part of the hotel
stay is purchased and the our air travel is purchased.
And once I bought plane tickets, I was like, all right,
I got some other things that I need to work
on right now. Will come back to planning the strip later.

(16:57):
And I haven't decided what I want to do exactly yet.
So I mean, the British Museum is a great place
to get lost for the day. Yeah, there's a lot
of interesting stuff you can go, you know, pay your
respects to the ghost of Mike the Cat. You can.

(17:17):
I certainly have a list of interesting things that I
like to do. There are you gonna go see the dinosaurs?
I don't know what I'm gonna do. I haven't decided anything.
Uh uh, because you have some time to yourself right
while he's working is yet. Yeah, well, but the time
that I have to myself, we won't be in London. Ah,
so yeah, yeah, we really need to sit down and

(17:42):
like look at things. Because because I bought plane tickets
and then was like, all right, we'll figure out all
the other steps later, and then we have not figured
out other steps. Eh, that's fair. I bought the plane
tickets for our trip to Italy and then my best
friend is handling most of the rest of it. Yeah,
and I'm like, bless you, you beautiful creature, because I'm yeah,

(18:03):
my brain cannot right now. Yeah. My trips outside of
the United States, with the exception of our honeymoon, for
the last decade, have all been work trips. So there
has not been a trip where we have left the
country and and I have needed to plan anything because

(18:26):
Michael has been planning it and you and I have
been hosting it. Based on the work of Michael and
Michael's team. Yeah, and our honeymoon. Patrick basically planned it,
but we also had We went to Iceland, and we
had kind of a bucket list of things that we
wanted to do while we were there. But then other
than that, we did not plan things other than where

(18:47):
we were staying each night, and we just explored as
we winged it. Yo, Like, we had our lodging arranged
and we had some things we definitely wanted to do,
and then we just like explored Iceland, which was a
lot of fun. You can do that in London, for sure.
It's a ton of great places to eat. Yeah, we
do need to figure out where we're staying. That's the

(19:09):
thing that we should handle soon. Yeah, but yeah, I
don't I don't know the rest of it yet. We
did make one trip to Canada in that we flew
to Buffalo Niagara Airport to go elsewhere in New York,
and because we were right there, we walked across the
bridge into Canada and had lunch in Canada and then

(19:31):
we came back with the rest of the way to
where we're going in New York. I can't wait to
find out where all you end up going in London.
I love that city so much. Yeah, there's so many great,
great things to do there, just great places to hang. Yeah,
great cocktail culture, great, great fun. I've had great fun

(19:51):
in that city. We'll figure it all out. Yeah, you know,
as long as the world is still happening, lets us get,
let us go. I will say, I just flew. We
recently released an episode where we talked about the TSA
and how easy Brosie it could be, and it was recorded,

(20:13):
and we put a note in front of that behind
the scenes that we had recorded it before the shutdown
had ground everything to a halt and like Atlanta was
having four and five hour weights and whatnot. But I
recently traveled for we went away from my husband's birthday
and we were like kind of white knuckling it because
we didn't know if things would would be righted by then. Yeah,

(20:36):
we had a one minute weight at security. It worked out.
We got so lucky. Yeah, so lucky. It was so
easy for us that I almost felt bad. I had
the early stage of it, yeah, where it was like
a two hour weight, although I had ticket that let
me not do that, Like I had a Sky priority,

(20:56):
so I was not too bad. But I saw the
early stage and I can't imagine the long ones. So
my hat is off and my heart goes out to
anybody that had to wait in those lines. Yeah. I
had a trip that was similarly during the earlier stages,
and it was none of my issues had to do

(21:18):
with TSA or or wait times. There was a crew
scheduling issue, and so my flight there got canceled, and
then there was weather and my flight home got canceled.
It's just bad luck. It was just yeah, yeah, And
I fortunately had enough loyalty points to get a free

(21:42):
hotel for the night that I was stranded in Raleigh. Anyway, anyway, Wait,
the airline didn't put you up, no, because it was weather,
all right. They did compensate me for the canceled flight.
That was a staffing issue that was there. Gotcha anyway. Anyway,

(22:08):
whatever is happening on your weekend, I hope there are
no canceled flights and no delayed flights and no long
lines of any kind. That things are going as well
as possible. We are recording in the midst of just
continual global chaos, but also the joy of spaceflight. Yeah,

(22:36):
so you know, I hope you're able to find some joy,
have some good things going on. We will be back
on Monday with a brand new episode. You will also
have a Saturday Classic tomorrow. Stuff You Missed in History
Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,

(22:57):
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