Detecting fossils from smartphone photographs using Large Language Models (LLM)

Using AI to describe fossils. I’ve been experimenting with GPT-4o to see how well it can describe fossils from smartphone photographs. At a high level it seems to perform reasonably well given most fossils found are not complete specimens.

In my unscientific experiment using 10 commonly found fossils from the Jurassic Coast in England, it was correct for 6 of them, not bad given it was just one photograph per sample.

There may be educational applications for outreach activities, to perhaps engage people in the rocks around them that they otherwise may not be aware of.

These models are only going to get better, so one to keep an eye on if you are interested in this.