#Chatbot Crafters Course

[sacredmindin]

The Sensor Savvy - AI for Real-World Identification Course

Enroll in The Sensor Savvy - AI for Real-World Identification Course and master the use of AI to detect, analyze, and identify real-world objects using smart sensors and machine learning.

[parkpavilion]

What Happens When You Ask a Chatbot If the Pope Wears a Funny Hat?

Been thinking a lot this week about thinking. That is, what happens in your mind when something's on your mind? Such thoughts, whatever thoughts actually are, have in the past been mere philosophical exercises useful only for strengthening imaginary mental muscles, but the meteoric rise of ChatGPT and other Large Language Model AIs has the media buzzing about practical, real-world applications. Nothing will ever be the same again! Or so the chorus sings. As with other recent techno-cultural innovations, though—how many Bitcoins are your NFTs worth at the moment?—thus far there's much more being promised than delivered. Still, artificial intelligence is something we now have to deal with rather than just talk about. The bots peddle misinformation all too readily, though they occasionally produce a credibly mediocre college-level essay, and they’re getting better at doing that every day. In the literary world there's concern that computer-generated stories, scripts, and even novels in the style of popular authors will soon be produced in an instant, without any human involvement at all. Given how these bots operate, assimilating every word that's already been published, reassembling select chunks of verbiage, and then disgorging the results, it doesn't seem as if there's a danger that the machines will create any truly original art. Not every reader wants that, of course. Comfortable familiarity can be pretty good business, and the Clancy and Cussler estates aren't going to be happy to be cut out of it. So this stuff isn't something we in the book world can ignore. Fortunately, many writers have been wrestling with the implications of AI since the beginning, creating some of the aforementioned truly original art in the process. Scientists such as GiulioTononi and Douglas Hofstadter have done just that in years past, and software engineer Blaise Agüera y Arcas has done so recently in Ubi Sunt, a ficto-factional hybrid. And a number of brilliant novelists have imagined their way into artificial minds, most notably for my money, Richard Powers in Galatea 2.2. Stay tuned for Benjamin Labatut’s take on the subject, The Maniac, later in the year. I must admit it was an image rather than a book that sent me spiraling down the rabbit hole, however. A photo of Pope Francis decked out in a swaggy puffer coat made the rounds on the internet, and it was days before most caught on that it wasn't kosher. The "first real mass-level AI misinformation case," one industry observer said. Scary that something made-up can be so convincing, but consoling that the truth can be more interesting yet.

Fake fashion Francis made me recall an item from the wardrobe of a much earlier pope, Gregory I, who sat on the Roman throne during the first millennium and enforced the conversion of the pagan Anglo-Saxons to Catholicism. As a conciliatory gesture, he commissioned English weavers to knit him an elaborate scarf in the appropriate color for celebrating Lenten masses in his chilly cathedral. They contrived a looping muffler, what we'd now call an infinity scarf, but what made it altogether unique was an unexplained twist in the fabric—the anonymous crafters had designed a Möbius strip centuries before it was officially invented in 1858. Its manufacture took so long that Gregory could knot it around his neck only a single time before his death, but it's preserved to this day in the Vatican Museum. The label on the display case describes it as a . . . one-side, once-worn, tying purple papal heater. Sorry, that was an awful lie and a worse pun, but at least its flaws were human ones, manifested as a frail blow on the side of absurd hope and groanworthy despair. Beat that if you can, chatbots.