Tuesday, March 14, 2023

AI States

I asked an AI to describe every US state in one word. This AI States map shows the results.

I used Stanford Alpaca to get a one word description of each of the 50 states. Alpaca is Stanford University's instruction-following language model. I asked Alpaca questions in the form:

"Describe Texas in one word"

to see how it would describe each state. 

As you can see from the map a lot of the one word descriptions given by Alpaca to describe states are topographical. For example Colorado, North Carolina & New Hampshire are described as 'mountainous'; Arizona is described as 'arid'; Kansas is described as 'flat; and Georgia is described as 'hilly'. 

A few states appear to be described by their demographic or cultural compositions. For example California, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Ohio are described as 'diverse' and New York is described as 'vibrant' (although I suspect that Alpaca may have been thinking about the city more than the state). 

On a few occasions Alpaca used more than one word when asked to describe a state in one word. On these occasions I shortened the answer to the most relevant (as determined by me) one or two words.

If you hover over a word on the map you can view the name of the state (shown in the top right-hand corner of the map). Before you start commenting that I've got Alpaca's answer wrong for your state you might want to note that I've discovered that Alpaca is inclined to often give different answers when asked the same question again. On the map I've used the first response that Alpaca gave to the request 'Describe (state) in one word'.

One major problem with my map is that the GeoJSON source I used for the state centroids doesn't appear to be very accurate. As a consequence some of the state labels aren't actually very central in the state that they describe. 

2 comments:

Ian Gilman said...

This is delightful! I think your answer for Washington is off, though… I suspect Alpaca answered "Historic" for George Washington, the public figure. If you had used "Washington state" instead, it would have probably answered "Evergreen" or some such. I tried the same question with and without "State" in ChatGPT, and got "Patriotic" for the name alone, and "Evergreen" for the state.

Anyway, fun project :)

Chimebuka said...

Why is there no D.C