The most common feedback to this project has been overwhelming support, so far. A lot of friends and strangers were happy to learn that something that has been happening to them their entire life is in fact not a problem, and perhaps it happens to most other people at some point in their lives even. Thank you to the thousands of visitors that have voted to say which oddities apply to them, and the hundreds of visitors that have sent in requests for corrections and new oddities! Many were added, and many corrections have been published!
The second most common feedback to this project is that it’s AI slop and it shouldn’t exist.
Now, I’m as critical of AI slop as the next person, but I’d like to think this project is a public good, and the strongest claim I can make defending my use of AI is: without AI this project would not exist. So if, taking that into account, you still think it shouldn’t exist, then that’s a fair opinion and you’re entitled to it.
I, personally, am neither a phyisician or a related profession, so my technical writing on anatomy is not better than an AIs in this matter. If you think I should have written the oddities myself, then a) it wouldn’t have been nicer to read, necesarily, and b) I wouldn’t have done it.
There are 161 oddities at the time of writing, and they have between 5 and 10 sources each, ranging from Wikipedia articles to meta-analyses of studies involving tens of thousands of individuals. I think it’s really nice this project exists, but I was not going to have read 500-1000 sources to assemble it.
You know who is happy to do that?
Odle (/ˈɑːdəl/) - the curator of this page. Odle is one of the big AI models in disguise. His task is to be relentlesly strict on the technical correctnes of all claims, clear in his writting, and ideally not sound anything like AIs sound when they write slop.
Odle can, as an example, check all several thousand claims and numbers on this page in an hour, when prompted, and is happy to do so weekly, at negligible cost.
One thing Odle can’t do too well is generate images. And yes, all images on this page are generated. Why? Well you’re asking one of two questions I suppose: either why didn’t I hire someone to draw these, or why even use cartoon images. The answer to the second question is that if you saw 10% of the oddities as real images, this page would need to be marked NSFW, and my goal was to keep it family friendly. The answer to the first question is that the budget I allowed myself for this project was 0 + some of my time. I did not succeed, because version 1 of the page had 0 images, and felt empty and sad. So I decided to invest a few $ into the images. That proved to be challenging, and continues to be so, because making correct, informative and pleasant anatomy images is hard. You will notice some are still not great. I aim to fix them.
Should an artist have been paid to create them? Yes, I would have loved to have a person make them, but it’s near 200 images, and while I’m certain a human artist would have done a better job than the AI, it would not have cost ~$30. And, again, if there were no AI, this page would not exist. The work the human could have done, would not have existed.
All this to say, if the project seems AI generated, it is. And from here on out, it’s an experiment in whether an AI can be an adequate curator of a labour of love, even if it doesn’t have the capacity for love. I’d like to think it will do a good job. This is still my project, I decide on the look, feel, and the wider strokes of the content, as well as write all the blog posts, but Odle does the grunt work of research, fact checking, and writing.