I decided to have one of the new AI chatbots (Artificial Intelligence) write this column. After I saw the result, I threw it away and wrote it myself.
I tried Google’s experimental Bard chatbot on a computer and Microsoft’s Bing on a phone. You write down a question or make a request and you get either a written or spoken answer. I asked Bard to write the column for me after submitting notes I had jotted down.
It was going to be a fairly positive column, but then I looked at what the chatbot wrote: “Chatbots have the potential to revolutionize the way we consume news….They help us to stay informed about current events and make more informed decisions.”
I never said that. It barely touched on my main grievance: I had submitted the notes for a previous article about a homeless shelter in Danville to see what would happen. The result was well done and would have gotten an A in English class. But it made up quotes that I never got from my subject. Maybe from the shelter’s website? Is this the future of news? And it was dull, dull, dull.
Later, I asked the chatbot to write a comedy skit out of it. I admit that it is hard to make humor out of homelessness. But it wasn’t funny at all. These bots have no sense of humor!
I was surprised that these chatbots couldn’t tell me what time it was or what the weather was unless I provided my location. They didn’t seem to know what time zone we were in. They seem to only juggle words together or look things up on the Internet.
I was pleased that it could tell me the 10 best basketball and baseball players and jazz musicians of all time. Unfortunately, almost all sports figures were modern ones. I think they got the info from articles written by writers who had no recollection of the past.
Neither model had trouble telling me who was the president of the United States, but they also wouldn’t predict the 2024 election. In fact, they wouldn’t even give me odds for sports games being held tonight.
I was glad that these chat bots didn’t give me any information about myself. It means solicitors can’t find me any easier than they already do. I was surprised that Bard knew a lot about our bed and breakfast.
These devices did a great job finding recipes or how-to instructions I couldn’t find elsewhere. I was disappointed that its list of the top 10 stories of the day included a few that seemed old.
Will they make journalists obsolete? For routine stories, maybe. I was never able to recognize later what I wrote for The Associated Press because many articles were formulaic. Unemployment reports, routine crime stories and earnings reports only require a programmed brain. So maybe a human doesn’t need to write them.
We have more information at our command than ever now, but it is much harder to separate fact from fiction. Even videos can be easily tampered with. I think AI is here to stay whether we like it or not. They couldn’t stop VCR and recorded music copying, the spread of leaked documents or even the atomic bomb, for that matter. We have to get used to it.
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