A Word in Edgewise: AI and Me — Curiosity Makes Three

Perhaps that “and” implies too strong a connection; I know virtually nothing about AI other than it’s a phenomenon that can whiz through everything you’ve asked about and give you information on your (very) specific question. If you’re a high school student, this may give you enough information to write a dangerously similar theme to your classmates, who, having input the same question, will have received the same answer.

I see AI as useful for more accurate medical diagnoses, where a tool that can search for every similar odd symptom noted through time will be a boon. An offering of sources a doctor might not first suspect, indicating, perhaps, lupus, which may present differently from patient to patient.

But, as I understand it, initial information must be input for the AI machinery to begin to recognize and gather similar information.

When I recently searched “Nazis stealing Maastricht ant collection,” an “AI response” replied, “No record of an ant collection: None of the available documentation detailing Nazi looting, including records of plundered artifacts from the Netherlands, mentions a specific ant collection from Maastricht.”

But there was. In 1911, Erich Wasmann’s already world-famous collection accompanied him from his Jesuit monastery to St. Ignatius College in Valkenburg, Netherlands, transferring later in 1941 to the Natural History Museum in Maastricht. A collection then of over 1,000 ant species, 200 termite species and 2,000 myrmecophiles (insects co-existing with ants) which the Nazis looted and shipped to Berlin.

John Wendell Bailey returned them post-war, for which he was awarded the Order of Orange-Nassau, with Swords, one of the highest awards of the Dutch government. (Bailey also garnered the French Government’s Croix de Guerre with Gold Star for participation in the liberation of the Nordhausen concentration camp.)

I’d known about the ants for some time — Bailey was my great-uncle — but I didn’t discover Order of Orange-Nassau until further (non-AI) online research using his name with “ants” reeled in the “Dipterists Society,” a site devoted to those flies.

Their “Fly Times Supplement 7” (2024) contained an article by Neal Evenhuis (Senior Curator of Entomology, Bishop Museum, Hawaii) titled “Wasmann/Schmitz Collections During World War II.” Ants (and my uncle) appeared under the “Dipterist” aegis because the Nazis had also seized the Hermann Schmitz collection of phorid “true flies,” some of which ended up in a wicker basket atop Rembrandt’s rolled-up “The Night Watch” in the Sint Pietersberg Caves in Maastricht.

My curiosity piqued by the Dipterists Society logo, an angular fly riding atop a balloon, holding its string, I quested further. I discovered that, more than a cartoon, “The logo and seal from the Society is adapted from the ‘Fly Times’ frontispiece provided by Jeff Cumming, which is an empidid male holding an earth-like balloon.” (FYI, there are over 3,000 described species of Empididae.)

Like turtles, levels of knowledge continue all the way down, but they must first be brought to AI’s attention before AI can bring them to ours.

I have just read, and will review in “Books” 793, Robert M. Edsel’s “Remember Us: American Sacrifice, Dutch Freedom, and a Forever Promise Forged in World War II.” There, on page 67, one reads of the Nazis ransacking the Maastricht history museum: “They even stole a world-famous ant collection.” There was no mention of Jesuit priest Erich Wasmann (1859-1931), who amassed the ant collection (or Jesuit entomologist Hermann Schmitz, whose phorid fly collection was also looted and travelled east on a freight car with the ants); that was not the author’s main concern, but the Nazi looting was known and noted.

There’s no harm in using AI for sources for your high school (or college) essay, but dig a little deeper and you’ll find lots, lots more. Things that might pique your own curiosity. As Shakespeare’s Hamlet said to his friend, “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” And who knows from whom the Bard pinched that?