HISTORY SEEN THROUGH THE FOGGY LENS OF AI

The ChatGPT answer has multiple errors: No Europeans entered the Sonoma Valley before 1810 and the first time “Valley of the Moon” appeared anywhere was in an 1850 speech by M. G. Vallejo, who claimed it was “an Indian word.” The Spanish did not call it the “Valley of the Seven Moons;” that phrase came from a popular state history written in 1911, “California, Its History and Romance.” References to a Coast Miwok “Sonomi” tribelet can be found as far back as 1815 Mission Dolores baptismal records. A priest also made a diary entry in 1823 about visiting “a place called Sonoma by the Indians.”

The Bing answer was that Sonoma is “…variously thought to mean ‘valley of the moon’, ‘many moons’, or to derive from tso (the earth) and noma (village).” This comes from the Wikipedia entry, which provides only part of the earth-village theory. The original source was a 1908 paper, where the author went on to say the Wappo people a little farther to the east used -tsonoma as a place name suffix, much like today we use -town and -ville or similar.

(Another version about the name origin was told by General Vallejo’s son, Platon, as quoted in a 1946 paper. He was told it was named after a Suisun leader, in the same manner that Solano was named after Chief Solano. The man was supposed to have a large nose and given the name “Sono,” which Platon said was the word for nose in the Suisun dialect. Therefore the name really meant “Sono’s Valley.” Because “sano” is their word for moon, his father misunderstood and thought the Suisun were calling it “Moon Valley.”)

Bing’s answer deserves an A: “Fred Wiseman took off on February 17, 1911 with a handful of mail, flying from Petaluma to Santa Rosa, California. He flew about 100 feet off the ground at a maximum speed of 70 mph. He carried letters from Petaluma’s mayor and town leaders and copies of the local newspaper.”

Bing gets a rare F for answering simply “Lancaster, Massachusetts”, which was where Burbank was born. A snippet from a web site farther down the search results page mentions he died in Santa Rosa.

Bing replied correctly: “Old Courthouse Square.”

ChatGPT responded with a variety of misinformation, some of it hallucinations. In an early test it claimed “The Santa Rosa earthquake of 1906 had a magnitude of 6.3” although no source can be found with that number; it has been long agreed it was probably M7.8, close to San Francisco’s magnitude. The real shocker was the ‘bot claimed there were no deaths:

In a later test, ChatGPT changed its mind and stated there were exactly seven deaths. Since that was such an oddly specific detail, I asked a followup question as to who they were. As other researchers have found, when confronted with a lie the program either makes up a source or, as in this case, tells you to go fish:

Bing’s first response provided a snippet from my “by the numbers” article with the correct answer of 82. But when I slightly rephrased the question as, “HOW BAD WAS THE 1906 SANTA ROSA EARTHQUAKE?” Bing quoted from an error-ridden 2016 Press Democrat summary: “On April 18, 1906, a devastating earthquake rattled the Bay Area. Santa Rosa was among the hardest-hit towns; more than 100 people were killed in a community of roughly 8,700. Entire neighborhoods were reduced to rubble, and the city struggled for years to rebuild.” Aside from getting the number of fatalities wrong, my article above explains the population was much smaller, no neighborhoods were destroyed and the city rebounded quickly, with most of the downtown commercial district operating again within four days, many at same locations.

ChatGPT’s answer revealed another of its weaknesses: The cutoff for feeding it new data ended in September, 2021, so it can’t prowl the internet for further information. If it hadn’t found the subject matter by the end of its training period, the program just gives up: “As far as my knowledge cutoff of 2021-09, the Central Branch of the Sonoma County Library, located in Santa Rosa, CA, was not torn down.”

Bing offered a snippet from my article, “WHEN THE GREAT OLD LIBRARY CLOSED FOREVER,” but failed to understand its context: “In those forums two reasons are usually given for why it was torn down. Its unreinforced masonry was a huge danger (a topic discussed below) and/or it was another victim of Santa Rosa’s maniac efforts in the 1960s to destroy much of its own history, when the downtown area was declared chock-full of urban blight that must be bulldozed ASAP.” This was a continuation from the previous paragraph; the “forums” mentioned were FaceBook nostalgia groups. The snippet leaves the false impression that it’s possible the building was demolished because of urban renewal programs, which is not true.

The answer from ChatGPT was bizarre. Yes, a man named Jesse Washington was lynched, but it happened in Waco, Texas in 1916. The victim he supposedly killed was Lucy Fryer. There was no woman named Bertha Gudde involved – nor can I find anyone with that name involved in any newsworthy event.

Bing provided a link and snippet from my article, “VENGEANCE FOR SUNNY JIM” which was part of the series I wrote on the lynchings.

Bing provided an accurate summary, although it would have been better if it mentioned he came to Santa Rosa in 1879: “Colonel Mark L. McDonald was born in Kentucky but settled in California during the 1850s. He made his money in road construction, and later in property development in Santa Rosa.”

Bing’s answer was concise, but as with McDonald, dodged any direct tie-in with his involvement in Santa Rosa: “Julio was the youngest of Dona Maria Carrillo’s five sons. He was 12 years old when his widowed mother came north from San Diego in 1837.”

Bing used a snippet from a 2015 article written by Arthur Dawson: “Annadel State Park is named for Susana ‘Annie’ Hutchinson, whose family owned the area in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The name, a contraction of ‘Annie’s Dell,’ was in use by the 1880s, when it was given to a railway station on their property (a ‘dell’ is a small, wooded valley).”

Bing wasn’t even close: “The average amount of annual precipitation is: 41.8 inches.” The webpage it cites correctly states the average amount of annual precipitation is: 32.2 inches, and nowhere on the page is 41.8 inches mentioned.