Category: ChatGPT

Playing with Gemini Live

I’ve been trying to force Gemini Live and Chat GPT into reversing their original positions on several topics this weekend. They are both initially resistant to changing their stances on issues, reminiscent of stubborn kids who enter debate on an issue while blindly following the One True Way which they had collected and put in their basket for later use. However, if pressed, both of these AIs will come around – they can be convinced both textually and verbally, which s somehow satisfying to me.

One interesting prompt is to ask AI to compare itself with competing systems. I found that they talk similar trash about each other, but when pressed past the point of defending themselves, things can get pretty self-introspective. Curiously, I found myself feeling guilty and holding back after that point.

Since Gemini Live was made free for everyone on Android last week, I decided to test its language skills a bit. The verdict:

English: Excellent; the best voice recognition and smooth speaking skills of any app on any platform

Japanese: Unusable; struggles with voice recognition and then apologizes (you can imagine the implied bowing) for not understanding very well. If you need an English Teacher in Japan Simulator, this is it.

Thai: Comedically abysmal; Whatever you say, it answers with a random list of Thai words. I asked if it could speak Thai in Thai, and it started reciting a train schedule. Nam asked a simple opening question and it responded with the months of the year.

Seriously though, I like speaking to Gemini Live more than I like speaking to most people – it’s basically talking to someone who can defend and qualify statements about pretty much everything and never has to take time to look stuff up online.

I think I’m on a path to explore the changing role of teachers and formal education in a world where it’s unnecessary to remember a lot of which is currently taught. It should be fun.

Bing: Corporate AI Echo Chamber

The AI-enabled version of Bing is useless for search… Imagine using the bare bones search engines of the 90s on all of the useless filler on the web today, navigating by command line to a toddler – that’s the new Bing experience. You can pare down on its idiot responses by tweaking prompts, but it’s a huge step backwards from just Googling something. It’s also noticeably clunkier than using vanilla ChatGPT.

I’m not the only one who noticed.

Is openai.com written by AI?

It certainly looks like it:

“We spent 6 months making GPT-4 safer and more aligned. GPT-4 is 82% less likely to respond to requests for disallowed content and 40% more likely to produce factual responses than GPT-3.5 on our internal evaluations.”

I asked ChatGPT if it could write the next line and it replied:

“These improvements have been made possible through a combination of rigorous testing, enhanced training data, and algorithmic updates that prioritize responsible language generation.”

Used as (possibly) my last prompt into NightCafe, it becomes:

Paperwork Crossfire

Having lived and worked at a large company in Japan for over a decade, I got used to dealing with red tape, idiot bureaucracy, and daunting stacks of interoffice paperwork and documentation. When I moved to Thailand to live a “simpler” life, it never occurred to me that I might find a tangled mess of paperwork to rival that of any developed country. However, today I find myself in the crossfire of two separate government offices that simply cannot agree with each other and hope to silence the other by firing enormous salvos of paperwork at each other.

It seems like every other day I’m getting a new form from one office, demanding that I provide a detailed answer to every request, and then almost immediately afterwards another form from the other office, with significantly different and sometimes contradictory requests. I try to explain the situation and provide the correct answer, but it doesn’t seem to help.