VEGAS MYTHS BUSTED: AI Knows Anything About Las Vegas

Posted on: August 19, 2024, 08:06h. 

Last updated on: August 19, 2024, 10:06h.

Corey Levitan Read More
Expertise: Commercial Gaming, Entertainment, Expert Insight, Las Vegas, Las Vegas Myths.

We’ve largely ignored artificial intelligence as a research tool. That’s because we know how to find reliable information about Las Vegas on our own. Also, truth be told, we’d rather not think too much about a technology that, once it gets good enough, will force all humans in journalism to greet you at Walmart.

Artists have much more to dread, at least at this point, than writers do about AI, which did a decent job of depicting how uninformed AI is about Las Vegas. (Image: Microsoft Designer)

The good news is that it’s not good enough. Not nearly — at least, not this week.

The Experiment

For our recent story about what happened to the art from the Silver Slipper, art collector Gary Autry told us that the casino was purchased by Steve Wynn, who knocked it down in 1988.

We knew this not to be true — that it was the Elardi family who bought the land. But, since it sits across from the Wynn today, we also knew that Steve Wynn purchased it more recently. And that’s because, in June, we wrote about the plans he announced, right before his sex scandal, to build a third Wynn Las Vegas tower across the Strip from the Wynn and Encore.

We just spaced on the exact year. So, instead of looking up the story we wrote, we decided to use this situation as a proving ground for ChatGPT. We asked it when Steve Wynn bought the land on which the Silver Slipper once stood.

We like to do this little thing known in the last millennium as fact-checking. So whatever answer we got, we were going to check it anyway. But we were curious what that answer would be. And we were not let down….


AI not only answered our question incorrectly, it threw in a bonus falsehood. Wynn did not purchase the land in 1989, and he built The Mirage nowhere near the Silver Slipper. The Mirage, which in 2027 will reopen as the second Hard Rock Las Vegas, occupies the former site of the Castaways casino hotel.

Already envisioning the very story you’re reading now, we pointed out to AI its incorrect answer without guiding it to a correct one. We replied “that’s not true” and grabbed some popcorn. Here was AI’s response to that…

Another winning AI depiction of the situation at hand. (Image: Microsoft Designer)

Was this a joke? Had AI detected our little experiment and decided to conduct its own retaliatory one on us?

Casino developer Michael Gaughan had nothing to do with either the Silver Slipper or Sahara, which was opened exactly where it stands today, nowhere near the Silver Slipper, back in 1952.

Bot Out of Hell

We could have kept typing “that’s not true” over and over, hoping for ChatGPT to self-destruct like that floating computer that began spouting smoke from its ears on the original “Star Trek.”

But we don’t have the capital to blow up a laptop. And besides, as a human, we had become overwhelmed with frustration and needed to scream at ChatGPT.

We corrected all the inaccuracies it told us so far, and then wondered, quite rudely and with multiple exclamation points and question marks, whether it knew any facts about Las Vegas that were actually true. (Sorry, we’re working on our anger issues in therapy.)

ChatGPT handled our anger very calmly and professionally. It replied with a handy timeline containing more inaccuracies. Can you spot them all? Let’s make this a fun game now…

You’re welcome, AI. OK, now here are all the new inaccuracies you just introduced…

1. The STRAT was developed on the site of Vegas World, which was opened by Bob Stupak in 1979, not the Silver Slipper.

2. The Pioneer Hotel and Gambling Hall is located in Laughlin, Nev. It was a sister property to the former Pioneer Club in downtown Las Vegas. Margaret Elardi, who owned both the Frontier and Silver Slipper, also owned both Pioneer casinos but she never built another one, or planned to, on the Strip.

3. There is no Sam Elardi — at least not in the annals of Las Vegas history. We realize this now, of course, though we still have no idea what annals are. But in the moment, we relied solely on our memory, which turned Margaret Elardi into a man named Sam. Nevertheless, you somehow confirmed that this nonexistent Sam Elardi did, in fact, acquire the site of the Silver Slipper. So we count that as your third inaccuracy.

We apologize for our sexist memory. We are only human. What’s your excuse, AI?

At this point, we asked ChatGPT, two more times, what year Steve Wynn acquired the Silver Slipper land. And we got two new incorrect answers. (We can’t make this up!) The first was 1998 and the second was delivered along with this doozy…

The former site of the Silver Slipper, circled in red, sits south of Resorts World and across Las Vegas Boulevard from Wynn Las Vegas. (Image: Google Earth)

Steve Wynn built Wynn Las Vegas across Las Vegas Boulevard from the Silver Slipper — on the site of the old Desert Inn, which he knocked down. And Wynn never took 10 years to build anything in his life — other than one hell of a nightmarish case against himself.

Allegedly.

Artificial Stupidity

We started out asking ChatGPT one simple question. Not only did it provide three wrong answers to that question, four separate times, it padded its wrong answers with seven more utterly false statements about Las Vegas.

And that’s with instantaneous full access to everything that’s ever been posted to the internet.

Finally, we looked up our June article and gave AI all of the correct info. It spewed most of it back to us dutifully…


To be fair to AI, which is something it would never be to us, we don’t think this is all necessarily its fault.

Artificial intelligence can only be as reliable as the information it collects. And so one of the main things our experiment proved is just how much inaccurate Las Vegas information exists on the internet, though AI should by now have a better sense of which sources to trust and which not to.

And that’s actually great news for the future of a weekly internet series that busts myths about Las Vegas.

By the way, an hour later, we asked ChatGPT to put the history lesson we taught it into practice, just so we could physically witness the hand we personally had in helping AI eventually replace us.

We asked it, for a fifth time, when Steve Wynn purchased the Silver Slipper lot. Here’s how it replied…


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