Tag: chatbot

what AI thinks of farting

The last two posts have focused on a recent conversation I had with the Microsoft Copilot AI chatbot. AI is impressive with what it can do so far, but it is also extremely overhyped. It doesn’t actually use reasoning or understand anything, and it has no empathy or morals. It is just reorganizing information that it has seen before, basically advanced pattern recognition and word prediction, along with clever scripting. I’m really concerned about how much it is being integrated into military applications and businesses. But enough about the seriousness of that. Just don’t believe the hype and don’t trust it for serious applications beyond what it is actually capable of.

Any time I talk with AI, I like to apply some randomness or absurdity to the discussion to see how it responds. My recent conversation went somewhat off-the-rails, or, perhaps a better idiom would be into-the-toilet. The AI had some amusing reactions to the toilet humor, and it was also surprisingly candid about the limitations of AI. Here’s the highlights.

The Important Evil Genius

Since AI knows about this blog, I asked it about the Important Evil Genius. He has participated in discussions here a number of times, and we even interviewed him once. He’s quite the character with a huge backstory (and plenty of monologue), and the AI provided a humorous summary of him and his arch rival Mr. Destructo:

That’s a very interesting summary! I’ve actually compared him to Doofenschmirtz before.

If you want to learn more about either of these characters, check out the interview linked above, which also has links to more of their discussions. They haven’t been here in a while… I wonder if the old man finally retired, maybe he took up gardening some ketunias for when he’s not yelling at clouds or telling kids to stay off his lawn. 🙂

Meta chatbot accidentally speaks unwanted truth

Not to focus too much on Meta (the company formerly known as Facebook, which also owns Instagram), but this story is too good to ignore. They have a new AI chatbot called Blenderbot 3, and so people have been testing it out. It’s been designed to talk about pretty much any topic. Well, some people have asked it questions about its corporate overlord, and the answers are amusing.

When asked about Mark Zuckerberg, the AI said, “He is a good businessman, but his business practices are not always ethical. It is funny that he has all this money and still wears the same clothes!” It’s not wrong…

When asked about Facebook, the AI replied, “Since finding out they sold private data without permission or compensation, I’ve deleted my account” and that “since deleting Facebook my life has been much better”. That’s actually good advice! But I have to think Meta is not happy with those responses…

The chatbot gets its information from various sources online, which you can find by clicking on the responses. You can guess where this is going. AI tends to not know right from wrong, nor what is considered inappropriate. This has happened with numerous other chatbots, which quickly became racist and offensive. Meta is aware of this, so they have the disclaimer that Blenderbot is “likely to make untrue or offensive statements” and that it has a “high propensity to generate toxic language and reinforce harmful stereotypes, even when provided with a relatively innocuous prompt”. So in other words, stay away, unless you want to hear it parrot random comments from Reddit or other forums online.

Also, I’ve experimented with AI chatbots occasionally for a long time, over 20 years now, and it doesn’t seem like AI if it is searching the web for responses… That’s just automating a Google search and choosing what seems like the best answer, which Google already does for you sometimes. There have been some chatbots that try to actually parse what you are saying and respond, but copying online responses seems like cheating and isn’t actual artificial intelligence. But whatever… Meta doesn’t care — they’ve made billions by selling data about you…