ChatGPT-Generated Poster of Supreme Court Justices Since 1900

My prompt: "Please create a poster showing all the Supreme Court Justices who have served since 1900, in chronological order, with the name and term of service for each one underneath the Justice's picture." The result:

Comments

[taqmcg]

What a fascinating view of all the things AI can get wrong while still mixing in some correct information! I was particularly amused by the images of Thurgood Marshall and Henry Blackmun and the justices whose names have been entirely forgotten.

My sense is that it's now rather more difficult to get something this corrupt with pure text outputs -- but creating images gives AI a much larger number of ways to fail.

[John F. Carr]

Thurgood Marshall's hair stands out in the mostly balding crowd.

[John F. Carr]

Congratulations to Noi Gersach for breaking the color barrier. His brother Noil looks so white.

[Archibald Tuttle]

That's a beautiful illustration of the good and bad about today's AI. It is very impressive what a good job it did overall, but the errors are devastating.

If the experiment was repeated with a skilled AI prompt engineer, the prompt may have been 10 times longer, but the errors maybe could have been avoided.

What the public doesn't understand is that prompt engineering is a skill that can be learned with a lot of work, but unskilled people from the public can create impressive but flawed casual creations. Both are true at the same time.

I asked GPT5 to create a prompt that could be used by lawyers to create briefs free from errors. The result was 4-5 pages of prompt instructions. Using that prompt could produce better briefs. But they still need to be double-checked by a real person. Today's AIs can help smart people to work faster, but they can't help lazy people to avoid work.

Tomorrow's AIs? Everything I just said might change.

[Bored Lawyer]

" a skilled AI prompt engineer, the prompt may have been 10 times longer, but the errors maybe could have been avoided."

Sounds like the priesthood from an ancient pagan god. Only the priests can ask a proper question.

[rswallen]

Nah, it wasn't that only priests could ask questions; it was that only the priests got answers.

[Bored Lawyer]

Same thing here. Anyone can ask AI anything. Whether you get a good answer or complete s--t depends on training.

[DS]

Congratulations to Stephon G. Broper, who served this country as a justice for over 17,000 years. Though I seem to have missed most of those years and got stuck thinking it's still early 2026...

[Bored Lawyer]

Wow. Thurgood Marshall was really a white woman.

Does the NAACP know about this?

[Michael P]

It's curious that both this poster and the presidents one duplicated the top right name and years of the slot immediately to its left, but neither picture was duplicated (at least the same way).

[Stupid Government Tricks]

William R. Day served two terms .... backwards ... and overlapping. That's hard to beat.

ETA that William O. Douglas served backwards first, then served forward from where his backwards term had started. Take that, Benjamin Button!

Three were anonymous. One of them served two parallel terms, 1940-1967 and 1949-1961.

[fatnastyretiredguy]

What really amazes me is that people smart enough to get into and graduate from law school, and some even become judges, don’t recognize the risk of using this tool without even double checking its work. Laziness, stupidity or just plain lack of ethics. I think there is a message in all this. Not sure what it is, but pretty sure it is a depressing statement about human nature.

[Krayt]

This sort is a hot thing going around. I saw an AI gen of "a poster of the alphabet with an animal starting with that letter." It started out well, but after 5 or 6 entries started going off into the weeds. Animal names didn't match their letters. Letters started repeating and getting out of order. The last animal didn't even have a letter, but did have a nice smile.

[Darwinnie]

People are saying that this is all true. Can you believe it? Bush II held office for 20 years and the fake news legacy media covered it up. It was the biggest fraud in US history.