There I was lying in bed last night trying to form a connecting between the Seals and Signets Minister in Jupiter Ascending and Grand Maester Pycell in Game of Thrones. My tired brain thought they might be the same actor who portrayed both characters. They are not. Terry Gilliam is the former, Julian Glover the latter.
I decided to look this information up this morning. I could have gone to IMDB or Wikipedia to read about the film and show and their respective casts. This is 2025, so I gave AI a shot at it first.
First up, chat.com from OpenAI.
Not a great start. Chat decides Edward Hogg was in the movie and the show. Edward is indeed credited in Jupiter Ascending. He was not credited in Game of Thrones. Moreover, the specificity of the answer leads me to believe this is an indication that a hallucination took place. The final sentence also contradicts itself sating there are no overlaps, but Edward Hogg is a notable connection.
Next up, perplexity.com. I had high hopes for the answer from perplexity.
I want to love these new search engine services like perplexity. This kind of a response gives me pause. The first line, "There are no actors who appeared in both Jupiter Ascending and Game of Thrones" is already incorrect. Worse still, In the second paragraph, perplexity gets the correct answer, Sean Bean, though does not in fact make the connection. The paragraph ends with "However, he is not a common actor between the two series." The prose ends with "Therefore, there are no actors who have appeared in both Jupiter Ascending and Game of Thrones." Quickly scanning these results as an information worker might do during research would lead you to the wrong conclusion. Disappointing.
Finally, I tried some local AI. I used Ollama v0.5.7 and llama3.3-latest from the model repository.
Llama is the first model to get the correct answer of Sean Bean, including the characters he played in the movie and the show. It should have stopped here.
Llama also hallucinated. It first gave Gugu Mbatha-Raw as a second answer. Gugu Mbatha-Raw is in Jupiter Ascending, but not Game of Thrones. Interestingly, throw the course of answering, Llama realizes this, and hallucinates another connection, David Ajala, who is also in Jupiter Ascending but not Game of Thrones.
Generated text from large language models have their uses. For reference information, I am going to stick with curated sources for reliable information for the time being.
Cover art generated using Adobe® Firefly
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