Excitement and anxiety are definitely rising as we close in on the final stages of this project. I might just be speaking for myself, but I have a feeling my teammates relate: As the time arrived where we would have to write out new prompts and actually produce the dataset, arguably the marquee feature of the AI Hallucinations project, we suddenly found ourselves oh-so-preoccupied with other things: Setting up appointments with the digital fellow and other advisors, adding to and refining the website, double-checking our archives and prompt-writing guidelines.

Reality had its own plans: The original plan was to each write about 15 prompts based on archival research on the Puerto Rican and Diasporican histories, query the models, and collect the data and then repeat the process for an aimed total of 100 prompt responses. But in the class before last, Sasha suggested we slash the size of the new dataset in half, so that we only write 15 prompts each for an aimed total of 50 responses. We were so focused on refining our fact-checking process and prompt-writing criteria that we soon realized we did not have enough time to break up the prompting process into two stages like we had originally planned.

Turns out, writing the prompts took up more time than any of us had originally expected. On Friday afternoon, we met at the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, with varying degrees of springtime allergies. None of us had finished writing our allotted prompts, as planned, so the first hour of our session was dedicated to finishing up that work together. Sasha and I finished writing our prompts quick enough that Sasha was able to walk me through prompting the models and organizing the output. We did not have time to fact-check any of the outputs together. So we spent the last 20 minutes of our time together reorganizing our schedule and priorities for the coming week.

Since we are further along on the website development side, we reprioritized as follows: We will each fact-check our own model outputs individually during the week, and come together to trouble-shoot in class. The other half of our time in class will be dedicated to making some final decisions regarding our web-hosting and domain because GoDaddy hates us. This is fact-checking week in more ways than one, as on Friday, we also confirmed two meetings with advisors: One with the Digital Fellow and another with Luke Walzer, both of whom have expressed an interest in going over our fact-checking procedures and methodologies. These meetings and our response fact-checking efforts during the week, should put us in a good position to start concluding the fact-checking phase of the project. After this coming week, we will focus on finalizing the website and preparing our materials for sharing and launch.