The next article in this issue opens a new multi-part series with an interesting and remarkable backstory. It started out as a series of articles by Joel Orosz in our print journal, The Asylum. That's interesting to many of us and worth remarking on, but the really interesting part is the journey from there to here.

I initially suggested the idea to Joel as an excerpt from the articles, in order to give readers of The E-Sylum a taste of the great product they're missing out on if they're not members of the Numismatic Bibliomania Society. Joel was on board, but there was a parallel effort that would eventually combine with this one.

Newman Numismatic Portal Project Coordinator Len Augsburger had been experimenting with ChatGPT to summarize NNP content. He'd generated a summary of Q. David Bowers' book on dealer Abe Kosoff. He commented, "It's not the most trenchant analysis (there is no discussion of Kosoff's appraisal of the Lilly collection for example), but it is accurate and publication-ready. Really amazing." Here are the first few paragraphs:

I responded with a link to an amazing post about what can be done with these tools already (linked below). I took a few minutes to reflect and wrote this, which I later dreamed up a headline for.

To put this event into perspective, consider this chart posted by Kyle Hailey on Twitter. It shows the number of days it took popular internet platforms to reach their first million users, and their first 100 million users. ChatGPT leapfrogged to 100 million in practically no time at all.

Joel responded:

I thought it was well worth a try, and Len offered to run Joel's articles through ChatGPT for summarization. Joel was on board, but wrote "My nagging fear is that the summary will come out much more creative and witty than the originals!"

It took a few tries to wrangle the logistics and Len's effort succeeded, although Joel needn't have worried about the machine's originality and wit. Here's an excerpt.

I wrote:

Joel replied:

Well, the World Wide Web begat the job description of "Webmaster", but the term I'm seeing for today's Large Language Model Wranglers is "Prompt Engineer." Maybe it soon won't even be necessary to 'splain it to people.And someday, maybe just a few years from now, someone will say, "You know, you young people don't know how good you have it. Back in my day, we had to write prompts by hand. Here's my old email signature that says 'Prompt Engineer.' Remember e-mail?"

For grins, I asked ChatGPT to "Please make me a poster for a movie called "I Was a Teenage Prompt Engineer", in the style of a 1950's horror film poster." Here's what it came back with, almost instantly:

Amazing!ChatGPT itself only produces text, but that was marvelous. Another OpenAI product, Dall-E produces images. As you can see, that's got a ways to go yet. Maybe I need to hire a Prompt Engineer...

To read some articles on ChatGPT's power and promise, see:
Superhuman: What can AI do in 30 minutes?(https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/superhuman-what-can-ai-do-in-30-minutes)
Attention is All You Need(https://www.notboring.co/p/bdc3e87d-d410-4226-91b1-5ac3aabe060e)
ChatGPT sets record for fastest-growing user base - analyst note(https://www.reuters.com/technology/chatgpt-sets-record-fastest-growing-user-base-analyst-note-2023-02-01/)
chatGPT : something different is happening. (https://twitter.com/kylelf_/status/1623679176246185985)

To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see:
OH E-SYLUM, NUMISMATIC HIVE(https://www.coinbooks.org/v25/esylum_v25n50a12.html)