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Make no AI plans

July 4, 2025 at 4:26 PM by Dr. Drang

A couple of weeks ago, I asked ChatGPT to plan a driving route for me to visit all the Louis Sullivan jewel box banks. My goal was to make an Apple Note with all the banks and their Apple Maps links so I’d have everything I needed in a single document, but I didn’t have time right then to make the Note, so I put it aside without looking at it carefully. Today I went back to the ChatGPT conversation to pull out the information and found—well, you can probably guess what I found: one major mistake and a couple of minor ones. Enough errors that I ended up writing the Note without copying any of the info ChatGPT gave me.

Here’s ChatGPT’s unnecessarily verbose introduction to the route it planned:

The eight “jewel box” banks designed by Louis Sullivan are located in the Midwest, primarily in Iowa and Illinois. To visit them all, a logical route can be planned to minimize driving distances. Here’s an optimized route starting and ending in Chicago, Illinois, for convenience:

To its credit, ChatGPT did get the number of jewel box banks correct, even though I didn’t include that in my request. However, the “primarily in Iowa and Illinois” part is troublesome. Iowa is fine—there are three in that state—but Illinois? We’ll see about that later.

Here’s the list of banks in the order I’m supposed to travel:

  1. National Farmers Bank of Owatonna
    101 N Cedar Ave, Owatonna, MN 55060
  2. Peoples Savings Bank
    101 1st Ave SW, Cedar Rapids, IA 52405
  3. Henry Adams Building
    124 E State St, Algona, IA 50511
  4. Merchants National Bank
    833 4th Ave, Grinnell, IA 50112
  5. Home Building Association Company
    23 S Park Pl, Newark, OH 43055
  6. Peoples Federal Savings and Loan Association
    101 E Court St, Sidney, OH 45365
  7. Purdue State Bank
    210 Main St, Lafayette, IN 47901
  8. Land Bank (Southwest State Bank)
    331 E Monroe St, Springfield, IL 62701

Going from Grinnell, Iowa, to Newark, Ohio, makes for a long day of driving, so I doubt this is the “optimized route” ChatGPT claimed. At least it’s not optimized for the person doing the driving.

More important, though, is the last bank on the list, which is fictitious. There are no jewel box banks in Illinois. And as far as I can tell, there’s no bank of any kind at that address. Maybe ChatGPT got tired after getting seven out of eight right.1

The eighth jewel box bank is the Farmers and Merchants Union Bank in Columbus, Wisconsin. The Wikipedia pages for most of the other seven banks—Newark, Sidney, West Lafayette, Cedar Rapids, Grinnell, Algona, and Owatonna—have links to all the others, so it’s hard to imagine how ChatGPT messed this up.

While I’ve had some success with LLMs—and ChatGPT in particular—the successes have come with coding problems, where checking the results is easy and immediate: I just run the code generated for me and see if it works. Other errors take effort to find, and I’m finding that effort often greater than just doing all the work myself. This problem, for example, took basically just a couple of Kagi searches and then following the Wikipedia links. And I now have a Note with all the (correct) information I need.

One more thing: Don’t write to tell me that my title for this post is messed up. I know it was Daniel Burnham who said “Make no little plans,” not Louis Sullivan. I just couldn’t think of a good title based on “Form follows function.” And frankly, a Burnham/Sullivan mixup seems appropriate for a post about AI.

  1. Close enough to right, anyway. The address it gave for the bank in Newark, Ohio, is wrong, but the real address is just around the corner. If you went to the ChatGPT-supplied address, you’d see the bank across the town square. ↩

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