Cédric Beaume

Applied Mathematician

You are in Draw me a what?

Draw me a what?

Hey, look, I made you this drawing:

Do you know what it is? Go ahead, dare a guess...

I know what you are going through: your mind is blank and you are maybe having a bit of a laugh at the absurdity of my drawing. I too can't help but laugh at it. In fact, what I did was simply to ask our favorite generative AI chatbot, ChatGPT, to teach me to draw a rabbit in simple steps. Look for yourself, this is the set of instructions that I received:

My drawing satisfies all the instructions from ChatGPT so... I drew a rabbit, right? After all, I followed the instructions of my teacher.

What the above experience shows is that following mindlessly an AI, which I simulated by ignoring my knowledge of what a rabbit looks like and by ensuring that what I draw does not violate any of the AI rules, yields terrible results. Would you submit this drawing to a pet store that requires a logo to display next to their rabbit food stands? Of course not. Well, when you use AI to write your scientific reports and submit them to me, they look like my rabbit to you. It is obvious to me that you did not learn to draw your rabbit and you are insulting my intelligence by requesting my time to read something else's work.

My students know that I have very little artistic skills, yet, by following ChatGPT's instructions, I could manage to draw a shape suggestive of a rabbit (see below, top left panel). I have enlisted the help of somebody more artistically gifted than me, and asked them to produce the drawing of a rabbit with the same instructions (see below, top right and bottom panels). As you can see, the AI instructions are good enough to allow us to draw something that looks like a rabbit if we know what a rabbit looks like. However, even then, problems remain that prevent us from drawing as well as somebody who is free from AI constraints: (i) in what direction should the body lean? (ii) how should the front paws be drawn? (iii) where should the tail be located? (iv) what should be the nose orientation?

I have one more deception up my sleeve for you: I will not quote Saint-Exupéry as the page title suggests. Rather, Rabelais illustrates this modern problem in Pantagruel "Science without conscience is but the ruin of the soul". AI is a great tool but using it without any scepticism or understanding of its limits is simply a process that leads to unsatisfactory performance and intellectual atrophy. You will not fool anyone, so think twice.

© ~ 2011–2025 ~ Cédric Beaume