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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   777 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 8, 2025

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@self_made_human, it's been a couple of weeks since we had that AI discussion and you agreed to run a couple trials for me. I apologize for not getting to it sooner, but I had some big idea that I was going to find representative examples for each category and see how well it did, and update the algorithm to be more precise with regard to how I actually do it manually, but I of course didn't have the time to spend and it fell by the wayside. So I'll just throw out two releases to get you started for now, for which the suboptimal algorithm is irrelevant:

  • The Turtles - Grim Reaper of Love

  • Henry Paul Band - Feel the Heat

I'll try to post some more that present different challenges to see how the model handles them, but these two highlight something that the free models of ChatGTP seemed to struggle with.

To make things easier, these are both American releases. So you don't have to look back, here are the instructions:

For major label albums released circa 1991 or later, an official street date should be available. This gets first priority. If a release date is provided by a reputable source such as RateYourMusic, Wikipedia, or 45Cat, use that date, giving 45Cat priority. If a reputable source only provides a month of release, use that as a guideline for further research, subject to change if the weight of the evidence suggests that this is incorrect. If any other source purports a specific release date, use that date, provided it does not conflict with information provided in reputable sources. Other sources include other websites, Google search results, and message board comments. For US releases from 1978 to the present, use the date of publication from the US Copyright Office website if available. For US releases from 1972 to 1978, use the date of publication from the US Copyright physical indexes, images of which are available on archive.org, if available. For releases prior to 1972 or are otherwise unavailable from the above sources, determine the "usual day of release" of the record label, that being the day of the week that the majority of the issues with known release dates were released. Be aware that this can change over time. If no information is available regarding the usual day of release, default to Monday. If ARSA chart data for the release is available, assign the release date to the usual day of release immediately prior to the date of the chart. (ARSA is a website that compiles local charts from individual radio stations). If ARSA chart data is unavailable, assign the release date to the usual day of release the week prior to the date when the release was reviewed by Billboard, first appeared in a chart, or was advertised in Billboard. If ARSA and Billboard data are both available, use the earlier date (ARSA will almost always be earlier unless there was a substantial delay between release and initial charting). If neither ARSA nor Billboard data is available, use a similar system with any other trade publication. If no trade publication or chart data is available, determine the order of release based on catalog number. Assume that the items are released sequentially and are evenly spaced. Use known release dates (or release months) to calculate a reasonable date of release based on available information, including year of release (if known), month of release (if known) and usual day of release. If none of the above can be determined, make a reasonable estimate based on known information.

The following caveats also apply:

For non-US releases, domestic releases often trailed their foreign counterparts by several months. Any data derived from US sources must take this into account when determining if the proposed estimate is reasonable.

If the date of recording is known, any estimated release date must take into consideration a reasonable amount of time between recording and release based on what was typical of the era. For independent releases, dates of release from Bandcamp may be used provided they don't conflict with known information (i.e. sometimes Bandcamp release dates will use the date of upload, or the date of a CD reissue).

It didn't take me very long, since my first attempt at using o3 seemed to produce good results. I'm sharing the full conversation below, and it seems to be reasonable to me? You're the expert here, so you should be able to tell if o3 has mucked up.

https://chatgpt.com/s/t_6896665a38088191a35a94848d57c05d

To summarize:

o3 claims that:

The Turtles – “Grim Reaper of Love” (White Whale WW-231)

45Cat lists May 1966 for the U.S. single.

Billboard ran a Spotlight Singles review in the 28 May 1966 issue. Per your rule, with month known and no label weekday documented, assign the Monday of the prior week: Mon 23 May 1966. ARSA has it on the 10 Jun 1966 WLS survey, which fits late-May release then early-June airplay.

For the other release:

Cash Box 5 Jul 1980 shows the LP as the No. 1 Most Added at AOR, which implies servicing that week. Your rule puts street on the usual label day in the week immediately prior. I assign Monday, 14 Jul 1980. Calendar check confirms Monday.

It is worth noting that o3 ran into some operational difficulties. It desperately wanted to try and paste search parameters into a search engine on a site, but the interface I'm using doesn't allow it to. There is, in fact, a product called Agent by OpenAI that can control a mouse and keyboard, and which could plausibly do that.

o3, per the messages, is now asking me to go ahead and look up the song on the site if suggests, and is happy to examine the results.

I also ran something known as Deep Research, also by OpenAI in the background.

https://chatgpt.com/s/t_6896678a10508191b7076b3377144bec

To summarize, this ends up with a release date of Monday, June 6, 1966 for GRoL. For FTH, it claims that "reasonable estimate is June 30, 1980 as the official release date"

I also tried Gemini 2.5 Pro and Claude 4.0 Sonnet (the latter is good, but not the best).

Gemini:

Here are the release dates for the requested titles, based on the provided instructions:

The Turtles - Grim Reaper of Love

The release date for The Turtles' single "Grim Reaper of Love" is determined to be Monday, June 13, 1966. The song was released on the White Whale record label in May of 1966. It first entered the Billboard Hot 100 chart on Saturday, June 18, 1966. Following the provided guidelines, in the absence of a specified release day for the label, a Monday release is the default. Therefore, the release date is assigned as the Monday of the week the single entered the chart.

Henry Paul Band - Feel the Heat

The release date for the Henry Paul Band's album Feel the Heat is estimated to be in mid-1980. The album was released in 1980 on Atlantic Records. The single "Longshot" from the album charted on the Billboard Bubbling Under The Hot 100 in 1980. Another major Atlantic release from 1980, AC/DC's Back in Black, was released on a Friday. Without a more specific charting date for "Longshot" or a Billboard review of the album, and without access to a comprehensive Atlantic Records release schedule for that year, a more precise date cannot be determined from the available information.

Claude seems to have struggled the most:

For GRoL

Current Best Estimate: Without access to the specific Billboard chart entry date or copyright records, and knowing only "May 1966" from reputable sources, I would default to Monday (per your rules) in May 1966. Given that it was their fourth single and became a chart failure, it likely entered charts in late May or early June 1966, suggesting a release date around Monday, May 23, 1966 or Monday, May 30, 1966.

For FTH:

The search results confirm it's an Atlantic Records release from 1980, but specific dating information wasn't retrieved in the available searches.

I personally checked one of the PDFs o3 found, and it seemed to support its claim. Let me know if any links are broken in the share chat, or if you'd like me to try something else (such as manually search and share results with o3)

So these are some curious results, and mirror the issues I was having with the models I tried. For Grim Reaper of Love, it does correctly not that 45Cat lists a May 1966 release date (which every model was able to do), and also correctly notes the May 28 Billboard review, which it was the only model to actually find, since most of the others just defaulted to the first date charted. The curious issue is with the ARSA data. It did indeed appear on the WLS June 10 chart. However, this was not the earliest chart it appeared on. That would be the May 9 KBLA chart, and the prior Monday would be May 2. The even more curious thing about it is that the single appeared in 35 charts documented by ARSA prior to the June 10 WLS chart, so I don't know why it would have picked that one. This is, I guess, somewhat of an improvement; the only other model I tried that even claimed to use ARSA data was Grok, and it simply made up entries that didn't exist! The most interesting thing about this, though, is that it didn't actually follow the instructions. Maybe I could have been a little more clear, but the instructions said:

If ARSA and Billboard data are both available, use the earlier date

Maybe I should have specified that I wanted the earliest date, which would have been the date of the May 28 review, making the correct date based on the data the model actually used to be May 23, 1966. Then again, I thought I specified early that the month of release given by 45Cat and RYM should take priority, so even if this wasn't clear, it should have preferred the May date. In any event, it didn't get the correct ARSA date, so this counts as a fail.

Moving on to Feel the Heat, US Copyright data gives a publication date of June 16, 1980. Maybe this was the search engine it was trying to use, but it nonetheless didn't use it. I give it props for using Cash Box, which I don't even use that much because the available data is fragmentary and not easily searchable (or at least it was when I started doing this a decade ago), and it does point to the correct issue. However, it runs into the same problem of following instructions when it was told to use the date preceding publication but inexplicably picks a date after the date of the issue. Honestly, there must be something up with the pro model, because the free ones I tried didn't seem to have any problem following instructions, and at least gave plausible dates based on the information they had. Here I get two dates that are not only incorrect, but don't actually follow the rule. I had high hopes for this but at this point I can only consider it a failure. If you're interested in running this further, I can try to make the rules a little more explicit and find some other releases to test how it can do different things, but suffice it to say my opinions of AI capabilities haven't appreciably improved.

Thank you for taking the time to look into it yourself! All I did was copy and paste your prompt and egg the model on. It might be interesting to try the Agent mode, either on this prompt or a new one. I do have access, and I can try it when I get the chance.

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