Bodily Oddities Explains How AI Co-Curates Its Anatomy Project

Summary

Bodily Oddities is an anatomy education project containing 161 bodily oddities, each supported by five to ten sources ranging from Wikipedia articles to meta-analyses. Its creator says the project would not have been made without AI because manually reviewing the roughly 500 to 1,000 sources was beyond the project’s zero-budget constraints. An AI model called Odle acts as the project’s curator, researching material, checking thousands of claims and numbers, and drafting text; the creator says it can perform a full check in about an hour and repeat the work weekly at negligible cost. Human visitors have voted on which oddities apply to them, and hundreds have submitted corrections and requests for additions, many of which were incorporated. The creator remains responsible for the project’s visual direction, overall content decisions, and blog posts, while Odle handles much of the research, fact-checking, and writing. The project’s roughly 200 anatomy illustrations were also generated with AI because real images could make the site unsuitable for a family audience and hiring an artist was unaffordable, although the creator acknowledges that some images still need improvement. The article presents the site as an ongoing experiment in whether AI can adequately curate a research-heavy labor of love, while openly acknowledging criticism that it is AI-generated.