AN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE EXPERIMENT USING GOOGLE'S GEMINI, PART TWO: FROM JOE BIDEN TO CHARLY WEGELIUS

 

Following my last blog post, which set out details of my artificial intelligence (AI) experiment of finding out who has the most books written about them by using Google's Gemini, I was hoping that this second part of the blog post would reveal the results of my experiment experiment. But because of the length of this blog post, I will reveal the search results in a third and final part.

As mentioned, I searched the number of books written for well over 10,000 people, 10,718 people to be precise, which is a very big sample. But 1,544 searches of people yielded no results, that's nearly 15 per cent of total searches that Google's Gemini drew a blank (see Endnote 6 on no search results) and, in 50 cases, Gemini didn't even recognise the person's name (see Endnote 7 on names not recognised).

There were some very surprising names that yielded no search results, such as the names of Joe Biden, King Charles III (aka Tampon Charlie), Benjamin Disraeli, Muammar Gaddafi, Oliver Hardy, Bob Hope, Xi Jinping, Boris Johnson, Helmut Kohl, Vladimir Lenin, Emmanuel Macron, François Mitterrand, Dudley Moore, Jack Nicklaus, Plato, Richard Pryor, Theodore Roosevelt, Jane Russell, Donald Trump and Boris Yeltsin.

For example, Google's Gemini couldn't give me any results for Donald Trump, even though The Guardian claimed there are about 4,500 English-language books written about him. I cannot explain why Gemini couldn't deliver any results for him or certain other people, especially as it always told me when I searched that someone had no books written about them. There's something else going on. Maybe it's the right to be invisible on the internet which only rich people, and their estates, can afford to exercise and enforce, though I can't imagine Donald Trump wanting to exercise his right to be invisible on the internet. Maybe in a few cases there was some form of censorship going on for some names - genocide and serial killers often yielded no results. But I just don't know what's going on to explain the high number of no search results.

Out of necessity, I had to exclude these names from my list. This astonishingly high number of no search results casts considerable doubt on the accuracy of my final rankings of people whom have had the most books written about them. Arguably, it even invalidates the findings of this experiment.

And it gets worse. There were many, just over 100, people whose search results were so vague and even meaningless that I had to exclude them from my final rankings. To rank, I needed numbers or at least words that can be converted to numbers. Google's Gemini had a habit of not giving me numbers despite me asking it to give me numbers. There were gobbledygook findings, nonsensical findings offered by Google's Gemini. Such nonsense findings ruled out Jesus Christ, Jane Fonda, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Henry Kissinger, RuPaul, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, Thomas the Apostle and Tiger Woods from my rankings. See Endnote 8 for gobbledygook search findings.

Perhaps not quite so meaningless but still very vague, there were many people that had to be omitted from my ranking of people with most books written about them There were over 25 people that Google's Gemini told me that countless books have been written about them, including Winston Churchill, Confucius, Raphael, Socrates and Leonardo da Vinci - see Endnote 9 for people with countless books. I can't count countless.

And the there were those people that Google's Gemini told me that a vast, substantial or large number of books had been written about people (such as Thomas Edison, Alexander Hamilton, George Frideric Handel, Marquis de Sade, Richard Strauss and Margaret Thatcher) - see Endnote 10 for people with vast, substantial or large numbers of books.

The next one is a big one. Just over 1,000 people had numerous books written about them. See Endnote 11 for people with numerous books. Alexander the Great, Jane Austen, Ludwig van Beethoven, Julius Caesar, Johnny Cash, Christopher Columbus, Copernicus, Charles Darwin, Bob Dylan, Dwight D Eisenhower, Queen Elizabeth I, Benjamin Franklin, Sigmund Freud, Galileo Galilei, Mahatma Gandhi, King Henry VIII, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, John Lennon, Nelson Mandela, Karl Marx, Moses, Prophet Muhammad, Isaac Newton, Pablo Picasso, Vladimir Putin, William Shakespeare, John Steinbeck, Mark Twain, George Washington, William the Conqueror and Mao Zedong have just been taken out of the game!

Well over 250 people, according to Google's Gemini, had many books written about them - see Endnote 12 for people with many books. Because I cannot quantify what 'many' means, all these people had to be discarded from my reckoning, which included big-hitters like Alexander Graham Bell, Osama bin Laden, Cleopatra VII, Bill Clinton, Constantine the Great, Oliver Cromwell, Princess Diana, Charles Dickens, Adolf Hitler, Genghis Khan, Che Guevara, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Florence Nightingale, Richard Nixon, Barack Obama, Marco Polo, Queen Victoria, Voltaire, Oscar Wilde and Deng Xiaoping. Yet again, all were taken out of the game.

Similarly, there were 10 people searched for, including Noël Coward and Titian, who had extensive books written about them; nearly 50 people, including Vasco da Gama and Philip V of Spain, who had a significant number of books written about them; and 15 people, including Jahangir and Joseph Smith, who had a various number of books written about them. All had to be ruled out of the game because I cannot quantify what an extensive, significant or various number of books are. See Endnote 13 for people with extensive, significant or various books.

There were quite a few people that Google's Gemini did a number on. The problem was that Gemini just stated that a number of books had been written about these people when I asked for the number of books. See Endnote 14 for people with a number of books.

Nearly 800 people, according to Google's Gemini, had several books written about them. This list included, perhaps surprisingly, Tony Blair, Mikhail Gorbachev, Steve McQueen, Jim Morrison, Elon Musk, Max Weber, Robin Williams and Brian Wilson - see Endnote 15 on people with several books. All these people had to be discarded from my reckoning because I'm unable to put a number on several.

Well over 300 people were identified by Google's Gemini as having a multitude or multiple books written about them - see Endnote 16 on people with multiple books. I don't know what multiple means, is it 3,300 or 3,000? I just don't know. All had to go.

On the other end of the scale, Google's Gemini identified nearly 50 people, including Hugo Boss, Lyndon B Johnson, Laozi and Robert Mugabe, who had a limited or very limited number of books written about them. Again, all had to go.

Also at the lower end of the scale there's nearly 90 people identified by Google's Gemini of having some books written about them (eg Jim Bakker, Lê Đức Thọ), not many books (eg Henry J Heinz, Henri Nestlé), not a large number of books (eg Pierre Auger), a small number of books (eg Yakub al-Mansur) and a few books (eg Tim Berners-Lee, Beyoncé, Cristiano Ronaldo, J K Rowling) - see Endnote 17 on people with few books. Yet again, all these people had to go because of the lack of quantification.

Given I wanted a quantitative count and not a qualitative descriptor of the number of books written about people, I had no choice but to leave out those people with a gobbledygook or vague description of the number of books. I have no idea what number words like 'countless', 'vast', 'substantial', 'large', 'numerous', 'many', extensive', 'significant', 'various', 'several', 'a number', 'multiple', 'limited', some' and 'few' mean. I'm presuming 'countless' is more than 'few', but is 'numerous' more than 'many' and is 'several' more than 'some'? Even if Google's Gemini used these descriptors consistently between different people, and that's a big if, I cannot quantify from these indeterminate and unclear search results. However, there were a few words, like 'dozens', 'hundreds' and 'thousands', that Google's Gemini used that I did include in my ranking. I'm not a total pedant!

This meant 2,790 people were left out of my ranking. On top of the 1,544 people for which no search results could be found, this meant 4,334 out of 10,718 people searched for had to be excluded from my calculations, that's over 40 per cent of my total searches. This astonishingly high figure casts considerable doubt on the accuracy of my findings and, I would argue, even invalidates my findings.

Going back to my predicted top twenty, over half of my predictions were excluded because of no, nonsensical or vague search results. Left out of the game are Jesus Christ, Prophet Muhammad, William Shakespeare, Adolf Hitler, Donald Trump, Winston Churchill, Queen Victoria, George Washington, Nelson Mandela, Confucius, Leonardo da Vinci and Karl Marx. Still in the game are Napoleon Bonaparte, John F Kennedy, Queen Elizabeth II, Joseph Stalin, Marilyn Monroe, Abraham Lincoln, Michelangelo and Albert Einstein - just eight out of 20 names left standing!

Also out of the game are Alexander the Great, Ludwig van Beethoven, Simón Bolívar, Cleopatra, Christopher Columbus, Princess Diana, Francisco Franco, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Xi Jinping, Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, Vladimir Lenin, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Isaac Newton, Richard Nixon, Vladimir Putin, Socrates, Margaret Thatcher and Mao Zedong.

Do you think I've been too harsh in determining who's in and who's out of the game?

Do you like reading autobiographies and biographies? If so, what are your favourites of such books?

I like reading autobiographies and biographies, though I much prefer unauthorised biographies as they're likely to be more critically objective than an autobiography or an authorised biography. One of my favourite such books is Charly Wegelius' autobiography, Domestique, about his time as a domestique in the Tour de France and other road cycling races.

As mentioned, because this second part has done some heavy lifting, plus heavy reading, a third and final part of the blog post will reveal the results - just imagine a long drum roll in the meantime! Thank you for making it this far. I think now you may be able to understand why there's a trilogy.