[fitsbits] AI for FITS: header in bintables {External}

[Seaman, Robert Lewis - (rseaman)]

Happy New Year!

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.

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:

https://claude.ai/share/c65d893c-c02f-4679-81b2-7b29761b6f40

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:

https://condenaststore.com/featured/the-planet-got-destroyed-tom-toro.html

(Note the dark irony that the copyright holder is ready to sell you this on coffee mugs.)

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.

Your thoughts? Objections? Corrections? Suggestions?

Rob Seaman
Catalina Sky Survey
Lunar and Planetary Laboratory
University of Arizona

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