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Happy New Year!</div>
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I last investigated LLM AI’s when preparing to chair ADASS 2023, which had AI as a theme. That would have been the then-current free ChatGPT. I was not notably impressed. As a vacation activity this year, I have been putting more effort into evaluating the
first-tier pro (unfree) Claude AI (Sonnet 4.5) and have been more impressed with the SQL it has generated against a real database and on other tasks. For instance, it managed to create a runnable IRAF CL script and a compiled SPP program. The amount of handholding
needed from my end was manageable. For instance, I could point Claude to the IRAF CL and SPP manuals to figure out various issues itself.</div>
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The future of FITS remains a concern. Here are a few of my prompts and Claude’s responses about moving FITS header keywords to a binary table extension. I haven’t had my coffee yet and have only scanned the output, but since I already knew that metadata, including
keyword-style metadata, can be represented in a table in many different ways, I was more interested in what the AI would make of such a task. It appears to have made some useful suggestions:</div>
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<a href="https://claude.ai/share/c65d893c-c02f-4679-81b2-7b29761b6f40" data-outlook-id="9906fbb2-2654-48a0-b491-fdb6cec8f28e">https://claude.ai/share/c65d893c-c02f-4679-81b2-7b29761b6f40</a></div>
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I finished with a question about whether the whole AI exercise is honorable, and it handled that sort of thing ok, other than missing the implication that I seriously doubt a purely profit-driven AI arms race can possibly end well for humans:</div>
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<a href="https://condenaststore.com/featured/the-planet-got-destroyed-tom-toro.html" data-outlook-id="fc4c90f3-09ee-4a42-a32d-7efc410f6721">https://condenaststore.com/featured/the-planet-got-destroyed-tom-toro.html</a></div>
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(Note the dark irony that the copyright holder is ready to sell you this on coffee mugs.)</div>
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So yes, I do think AI has reached the state that it can be useful for esoterica like FITS. And yes, I do think we should be moving toward storing our metadata in binary tables instead of 80-column headers.</div>
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Your thoughts? Objections? Corrections? Suggestions?</div>
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Rob Seaman</div>
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Catalina Sky Survey</div>
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Lunar and Planetary Laboratory</div>
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University of Arizona</div>
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