In search of intelligence

It's Monday, and you've read the title for today's comments correctly.

I first want to offer some observations about ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence chatbot that may or may not be revolutionary in some way.  That all sounds fun and rather innocuous in most respects, but since its capabilities have been reported in a widespread manner, there are now instances of companies using it to write advertising copy and some universities are screening entrance application essays to determine if prospective students are or were utilizing the service to write the endless essays necessary to apply to the college of one's choice.

There are many more uses, most legitimate, for such a service.  A tech oriented podcast that I listen to regularly has spoken of it repeatedly and even had it write the intro to a recent installment.  And it sounded pretty good!

Not to be left out Microsoft has revamped its Bing search engine (remember that, since Windows users really didn't have a choice for some time?) to include an interactive dialogue box in which a user could "speak" to Bing and have conversations, sometimes with hilarious results.  There was a recent mention on this same podcast that users have expressed an interest in kissing this search engine, for reasons I still don't quite understand.

Programs that do at least some of this have been around for a long time.  When I first got into personal computing I bought an artificial intelligence program called Racter.  Users could carry on text-based conversations with the program, which was pretty limited, as I remember, and it would repeat words and phrases back as though it had said them in the first place.  I remember a reviewer comparing it to an automated version of Mad Libs (remember those?  My kids loved them!) and that is probably an apt description.

We bought our eldest granddaughter a toy called Magic Jinn and it was a verbalized version of the same thing.  A cat-like creature would answer your questions and carry on a rudimentary conversation with you.  Fun for an eight-year-old but when you get your first cellphone it kind of loses something, as it did with my granddaughter.  But it was kind of fun.

Now let's talk about native human intelligence, or the lack of same.

People say and do stupid things.  All the time.  But now there's often someone around who's recording the stupidity for ongoing posterity.  That's why it's different now.

I don't want to get into specifics, but there are certain members of Congress and other political figures who routinely put their feet into their mouths endlessly.  Are they stupid?  Probably not.  Are they cagey?  Quite possibly.  Did they mean to say something stupid?  Often they do.  Do they care about the repercussions?  Only if it costs them popularity or political capital.

The same goes for entertainment figures, mostly because they overestimate how much we want to hear from them on subjects that are clearly not their fields of expertise.  As long as there have been microphones, cameras and tape recorders it's been this way.

But now we have podcasts, where some of the entertainment world's members speak into a microphone and say unwise, outrageous and even inflammatory things.  And there's often a cost to this.

Scott Adams, who has been drawing and writing the Dilbert comic strip for many, many years, has also been writing a blog and conducting a podcast for some time.  These vehicles have little if anything to do with the happenings of the Dilbert strip or its characters.  I recall Adams being rather opinionated about the 2016 election and was ultimately right about its outcome.  

And now he went and said some pretty offensive things.  His own opinions.  On a podcast he records himself.

And now Dilbert will no longer appear in numerous newspapers.

I lost track of Dilbert, Wally and the pointy-haired boss when I stopped receiving a daily newspaper lo these many years ago (we'll talk about the newspaper biz sometime soon in another post).  Used to have a bunch of books that were collections of previous comic strips, and I often found them howlingly funny, if a little too real at times in comparison with actual corporate settings.

I remember some of Adams' musings from the campaign season of 2016 and didn't like what he was saying/writing at the time.  So this latest situation does not really surprise me.

Not the first time that someone took a fall for their opinions.

So the search for intelligence goes on.  Will let you know how it's coming.