Who is "CAC" on the new dime?
lsica
Posts: 1,747 ✭✭✭✭
So if the designers of the new dime are "Artistic Infusion Program artist Esao Andrews (obverse) and sculpted by Medallic Artist Eric David Custer (reverse)", who's initials are "CAC"?
Philately will get you nowhere....
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Comments
Google AI says this
Mr_Spud
Please don't quote Google AI slop. At least follow the link to the primary reference, which should be more trustworthy.
ANA 50+ year/Life Member (now "Emeritus")
Author: 3rd Edition of the SampleSlabs book, https://sampleslabs.info/
It’s so when someone asked if it CACed, they can say yes. 🤣
If they had left out her middle initial we could have had a 2026-CC dime.
"Obverse Sculptor: Craig A. Campbell"
https://www.coinnews.net/2025/12/12/1776-2026-semiquincentennial-coin-images/
Google AI is wrong. Surprise.
I heard a story that on the Franklin half in 48 that people were upset cause of John sinnocks (js) stood for Joe Stalin. Word is some wanted it changed but the mint didn't go with it
Just for fun I ran it on Grok, which seems marginally better, but not in this case.
Here is the reply after expert thought:
"For a 2026 dime (the special Emerging Liberty design issued for the U.S. semiquincentennial), seeing "CAC" likely means the coin has been verified by them and bears their sticker on the graded holder—not engraved on the coin itself. CAC doesn't grade from scratch (though they have a related service called CACG for full encapsulation), but their approval is highly regarded in the hobby." emphasis mine
Nope, that was the Roosevelt Dime in 1946
And the Franklin half.
"The report was, of course, untrue. It was explained that engravers always put their initials somewhere on coins, as did John Sinnock, the engraver of the Roosevelt dime. All was quiet for a while, until the Franklin half dollar came out two years later. To head off any more hysteria, Mr. Sinnock added his middle initial to this one, making it "J. R. S." But hysteria was not to be denied. People wrote in demanding to know how the Bureau of the Mint had discovered that Joe Stalin had a middle name."
https://www.nytimes.com/1959/02/15/archives/change-of-a-penny.html
I ran 1350 chemistry problems through chatgpt. It got 1330 of them correct. For the 20 it got wrong, it had problems reading graphs and images.
Most errors in AI are due to sloppy, lazy searches. If you ask "what does CAC mean on a dime", it will likely tell you about CAC grading. If you phrase the question in terms of the Mint designer and the v2026 coin, it tells you Craig Campbell.
All comments reflect the opinion of the author, even when irrefutably accurate.
The prompt in the screenshot seems to be "why 2026 dime says cac" and the response says "to honor designer Cellina A. Calacci", and also explicitly says she's the artist. I can't find any hits through either DuckDuckGo or Google tying her to the dime in any way.
This AI response is an outright lie. Excuse me, I mean "hallucination".
Google AI is just a compiler, it finds articles and gives a brief synopsis. If it's wrong it's because it found inaccurate information somewhere.
If it were even remotely intelligent, it would weigh the reliability of the sources it reads and verify its own claims before it published them. And as I noted, I couldn't find anything close to what it claimed even through its own site. Rather than blindly copy/paste whatever AI spits out, we should be doing our own research to verify the claim, else we produce our own misinformation that AI is just going to scan/digest and spit out again for someone else later.
This is true. But that is rather different than the outright hostility leveled at the AI. And that isn't limited to AI. People need to check all internet sources.
All comments reflect the opinion of the author, even when irrefutably accurate.
It's not really accurate to refer to it as only a compiler. LLM's do "research" but they don't simply compile the responses. They write text using probabilistic algorithms that do sometimes go astray.
All comments reflect the opinion of the author, even when irrefutably accurate.
The response is incorrect but the prompt is also garbage. My prompt yielded the correct result. That's not accidental.
All comments reflect the opinion of the author, even when irrefutably accurate.
Now I’m wondering who Cellina A. Calacci is 🤔
Mr_Spud
Dare I say . . . Google it?
Asked Perplexity.ai:
But neither of the sources pointed to actually have the reference.
ANA 50+ year/Life Member (now "Emeritus")
Author: 3rd Edition of the SampleSlabs book, https://sampleslabs.info/
Cellina Callacci molto vivace!