In a groundbreaking announcement that has taken the world of AI by storm, Google recently announced the release of Google Bard, Google’s smack-in-the-face reply to people citing ChatGPT as the “end of Google search.” Google Bard will be available to an exclusive group of “trusted testers”, says CEO Sundar Pichai, and will be available to the general public by next year.
Google Bard will allegedly be able to explain complex issues like the origin of the universe and outer space discoveries in language simple enough for a child to understand. “Bard can be an outlet for creativity, and a launchpad for curiosity,” quoteth Pichai and ‘All the World’s Stage’ for this next crusade in the AI revolution to pilfer.
Pichai broke the internet by announcing Google Bard’s existence less than two weeks after the worldwide launch of ChatGPT. I guess Bard was supposed to be a top-secret secret project, but the success of ChatGPT and the subsequent cloud it cast over the future of Google search caused them to spill the beans. Oh jealousy thy green-eyed monster! That’s Othello FYI. You probably don’t remember that, but ChatGPT/Google Bard will probably tell you that now. It will probably also tell you that in Act 3, scene 2, the exact dialogue was “O beware, my lord, of jealousy; It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on.” Which brings me to my heartache.
I applaud the business move. I do. It’s certainly not easy to develop a jack-of-all-trades chatbot along the lines of ChatGPT in any given timescale. And if Bard was indeed developed in the two weeks it’s been since ChatGPT came along, Google, you have my fervent respect.
I also applaud the fact this revolution evens out the playing field for people who maybe couldn’t invest a lot of money into their education and gaining industrial-grade skills. Congratulations- we can now pay off our student debt through AI-aided side hustles.
But, thy Joker-esque villain of a chatbot who eats hardworking individuals’ efforts for breakfast and poops rainbows of results for people who don’t put in the long, hard hours- I want an answer. Why do you expect us to clean up the mess of the “industrial scale specter of disinformation and spamming” as Voa calls it, that you will eventually create? Oh, and before you defend yourself, recall, as you certainly can, that your ancestors- Meta’s Blenderbot and Microsoft’s Tay- were accused of creating racist and inappropriate content.
Train your big guns on me, if you will, but before you do, let’s hear what other respected luminaries say.
“Yann LeCun, Chief AI Scientist at Meta and professor at New York University, believes “ChatGPT is not a particularly interesting scientific advance,” calling the app a “flashy demo” built by talented engineers. LeCun, speaking to the Big Technology Podcast, said ChatGPT is void of “any internal model of the world” and is merely churning “one word after another” based on inputs and patterns found on the internet,” reports Voa.
“When working with these AI models, you have to remember that they’re slot machines, not calculators,” Voa continues, “warned Haomiao Huang of Kleiner Perkins, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm. “Every time you ask a question and pull the arm, you get an answer that could be marvelous… or not… The failures can be extremely unpredictable,” Huang wrote in Ars Technica, the tech news website.”
Maybe the gist of my question is too complex for you- allow me to explain. Does all of human creativity and ingenuity, built through years of hard work, now boil down to keeping you running in a socially acceptable manner? As a business leader, do I have to consistently hold your hand and walk you through how to gauge the nuances of human behaviour- something I definitely wouldn’t have to teach my human subordinates?
Maybe you can’t give me an answer. Maybe that’s how it’s supposed to be- humans and AI continue to evolve side by side. You do what you’re programmed to do, and I do mine, and we occasionally scratch each others’ backs. Or maybe that’s how I wish it is- for “To fear the foe, since fear oppresseth strength, gives in your weakness strength unto your foe.”
