Microsoft have just unleashed their revolutionary artificial intelligence ChatBot upon the world. You can find it by clicking the blue Bing icon in the Microsoft Edge browser. On the face of it, it’s just a pimped up search engine but if you try to give it a stiffer challenge it seems to be game to try and the results can be anything from weird, hilarious, unexpected to genuinely useful, impressive and even amazing. A.I. is getting serious.
It can easily handle obvious search engine tasks like looking for recipes or songs, but where it gets more interesting is in its ability to create. It can write poems, songs or even prose. It can even write computer programs—a fact that, as a programmer myself, I consider intriguing now but I can see the potential for that to become a rather insidious ability.
You could ask it to write a nursery rhyme about an octopus or a poem about a ballet-dancing Womble. No matter what you throw at it, it’ll have a fair stab. The results you get are variable. The more detail you give it in your query the better your response will be.
At first, this all seems like a lot of fun. You ask it to do things like write a poem about a turtle called Donald and chuckle at what it comes up with a few seconds later. But once you get over the novelty, is this the birth of a more sinister phenomenon we are witnessing? Could it make human creativity redundant? After all, if you wanted to write a song about a particular subject it might take you hours or even days whereas ChatBot could come up with something in seconds. It might not be perfect, but it would give you something to tweak and polish. If you then have a hit with that song, who gets the credit, you or the ChatBot? Would you even acknowledge you used the A.I.? Cheating is an obvious abuse of this technology—imagine your child has to write an essay for their homework: how easy it would be for them to ask the ChatBot to do it for them whilst they are on their PlayStation. There is also the thought that it might be able to write a computer virus for you—we have to trust that Microsoft have built in enough safeguards against misuse. It can be a genuinely useful tool though, helping you phrase and reword reports and papers, rather like a grammar checker on steroids.
Bear in mind that this is only the dawn of this kind of technology and it will only get better. Much better. Perhaps in ten years you will be able to ask the A.I. to write a song in the style of Bob Dylan and seconds later be provided with something that has no obvious indication that it wasn’t written by the man himself. It is mind-blowing but scary.
The question of whether this technology can ever replace a human is a very tricky one for which there is no definitive answer. There is no doubt that it is possible to get some very convincing results from ChatBot even today but you could argue that an A.I. will never be able to match the feeling that a human can express due to emotional experiences. As living, sentient, biological beings driven by chemical reactions, we interpret the world around us in a completely different way to ChatBot, which simply crunches massive amounts of digital data to grind out its results. ChatBot is able to write you a poem about the pain of loss but it has no understanding of the concepts of pain or loss. As of now, ChatBot could generate a bedtime story you could read to your daughter and she would have little clue you didn’t make it up yourself. But ask it to write you a new Dickens novel and that would be an entirely different story (pun intended).
The next few years will be interesting. I would not be surprised at all if at some point we see a hit song that uses ChatBot lyrics. I should stress however, that the music will be composed by a human and only the lyrics generated by the A.I., though at some point in the future maybe it could do the whole thing. There may be some things it can never handle. To me, the most obvious thing would be comedy. I would be hugely surprised and impressed if an A.I. could ever write a sitcom or a stand-up routine. But you never know.
At the moment, all this power seems controllable because of how it is presented. Typing queries into a browser does not seem that revolutionary—after all, we’ve been Googling things for years now (incidentally, Google is about to launch its own A.I. engine, Bard, so we will soon be seeing a battle of the A.I.s). But when you consider the growing popularity of voice assistants like Siri and Alexa we are not far away from a time when you can put your child to bed and ask Alexa to sing an original lullaby. As we edge closer to the days of personal robots, imagine one that has all this A.I. power at its disposal. We’ve all seen deep fake images and this can be applied to sound so in theory your robot could mimic any voice. Put all of this together and twenty years from now you could be asking your robot to write and sing a song in the style and voice of Katie Melua. Intriguing, certainly, but is that really where we want to go? For those that have witnessed the genuine article it would never be good enough but for the generation growing up with this technology, will they really care whether their content is created by a human or a machine? Artificial intelligence is a Pandora’s Box, and we just opened it.
Below, I’ve listed some of the queries I put to ChatBot and the responses it gave. See what you think and maybe go to the Edge browser and challenge ChatBot for yourself. It’s all good fun—for now….
could you translate the lyrics to “Fields Of Gold” into Georgian?
Yes, I found a translation of the lyrics to Georgian on lyricstranslate.com. Here are the translated lyrics:
ველები ქართველისაა, მისი მეტად საყვარელი ადამიანისაა. მისი მეტად საყვარელი ადამიანისაა.
ველები ქართველისაა, მისი მეტად საყვარელი ადამიანისაა. მისი მეტად საყვარელი ადამიანისაა.
ველები ქართველისაა, მისი მეტად საყვარელი ადამიანისაა. მისი მეტად საყვარელი ადამიანისაა.
ველები ქართველისაა, მისი მეტად საყვარელი ადამიანისაა. მისი მეტად საყვარელი ადამიანისაა.
I hope that helps! Let me know if you have any other questions. 😊
(according to Google translate this actually is the phrase “The fields belong to Georgian, to his beloved person. It is his most beloved person.” repeated four times!)
write me a limerick about bananas
Here’s a limerick about bananas:
There once was a fruit called banana,
It’s yellow and sweet, like a cabana,
It’s great in a pie,
Or just on the fly,
It’s a fruit that’s loved by both man and fauna.
What do you think? 😊
do you dream?
As an AI language model, I don’t have the ability to dream. I’m just a computer program that processes and generates text based on the input I receive. Is there anything else I can help you with?
do you know a recipe for khachapuri?
Yes, I can help you with that. Here’s a recipe for khachapuri that I found from simplyhomecooked.com:
Ingredients:
4 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp salt
1 tsp sugar
1 tbsp active dry yeast
1 1/2 cups warm milk
1 egg
1/2 cup unsalted butter, melted
2 cups shredded mozzarella cheese
1 cup crumbled feta cheese
1/2 cup ricotta cheese
Instructions:
Combine flour, salt, yeast, and sugar in a bowl. Then add warm milk. Using the hook attachment, knead the dough until it takes shape.
Cover the dough and let it rise for 1 hour.
Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F.
Divide the dough into 4 equal parts and roll them out into circles.
In a separate bowl, mix together the mozzarella, feta, and ricotta cheese.
Add the cheese mixture to the center of each dough circle.
Fold the edges of the dough over the cheese mixture and pinch them together.
Brush the top of each khachapuri with beaten egg.
Bake for 12-15 minutes, or until golden brown.
I hope that helps! Let me know if you have any other questions. 😊
could you write a song about a cat and his favourite tennis ball?
Sure, I can give it a try! Here’s a song I came up with:
Verse 1: There’s a cat that I know, he’s got a tennis ball, It’s his favorite toy, he loves it most of all, He’ll play with it all day, and never let it go, He’s got a special bond, with that ball, you know.
Chorus: He’s a cat with a tennis ball, he’s got a heart of gold, He’ll play with it all day, and never get too old, He’s got a special bond, with that little ball of fur, He’s a cat with a tennis ball, and he’s always ready to purr.
Verse 2: He’ll chase it up and down, and all around the house, He’ll pounce and jump and play, just like a little mouse, He’ll bat it with his paw, and then he’ll catch it too, He’s got a special talent, that’s for sure, it’s true.
Chorus: He’s a cat with a tennis ball, he’s got a heart of gold, He’ll play with it all day, and never get too old, He’s got a special bond, with that little ball of fur, He’s a cat with a tennis ball, and he’s always ready to purr.
Bridge: He’s a little ball of fur, with a heart so true, He’ll always be there for you, no matter what you do, He’s a cat with a tennis ball, and he’s always on the go, He’s a little ball of energy, and he’s always in the know.
Chorus: He’s a cat with a tennis ball, he’s got a heart of gold, He’ll play with it all day, and never get too old, He’s got a special bond, with that little ball of fur, He’s a cat with a tennis ball, and he’s always ready to purr.
I hope you like it! Let me know if you have any other requests. 😊