Pleased to Meet You, Hope You Guess My Name
Spoiler Alert: It's Satan
In my article about Disney ruining it’s brand, I referred to the monster at the end of Fantasia as “Satan.” Some people took issue with this, and so I made a quick video essay in response—
Animated Accuracy
To be absolutely fair, the narrator, Deems Taylor, refers to this creature as a Tyrannosaurus Rex—
The first time she saw Fantasia, my daughter pointed out, “That’s not a Tyrannosaurus, daddy. He has three fingers. That’s an allosaurus.” Disney even repeated the error in their World’s Fair (and later Disneyland Railroad) Primeval World diorama—
So why is calling this a “T-Rex” a scientific error, but calling the demon “Satan” official cannon?
More Bad AI
As an aside, I googled “when did the creature at the end of Fantasia start being called Chernabog,” and Google’s AI assistant replied that it was called such in the movie itself.1 Which, as you know by now, is absolutely incorrect.
I’ve written before about how unimpressed by AI I am, but I recently read another article explaining its limitations, and I highly recommend it.
Over and over again, I have seen AIs fail at the Imitation Game in ways that revealing a set of strengths and weaknesses radically different from those of any human being.
No human being would be capable of reciting all the Super Bowl scores from memory, and also of listing hundreds or perhaps thousands of prime numbers, and even of breaking out into a song about why the primes are infinite – only to spout clueless nonsense when asked to list the prime numbered Super Bowl scores. (The fact that the AI models that do this can also breeze through college-level mathematics exams should change your opinions about the exams, not the AIs.)
Here’s the whole thing—
I asked Google again this morning, so I could get a screenshot, and this time it gave me a more correct (though still incorrect) answer that it happened “sometime later.” The fact that the answers are inconsistent is yet another failing of AI.