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I’ve been testing ChatGPT over the last couple of days. (If you don’t know what this chatbot is, here’s a good NYT article about ChatGPT and others currently in development.)

The avowed purpose of ChatGPT is to create an AI that can create believable dialogues. It does this by scouring the web for data it uses to respond to simple prompts.

By “simple,” I mean sometimes “horribly complicated,” of course. And sometimes a little ridiculous.

As has been pointed out, chatbots only generate texts based on what they have been fed, i.e., “garbage in / garbage out.” So if you push the programs hard enough, they will generate racist, sexist, homophobic etc awful stuff — because unfortunately that kind of sick and twisted garbage is still out there, somewhere online in a troll’s paradise.

So far, I have asked the program to:

1. Write a haiku about winter without using the word “winter”
2. Write a limerick about an Irish baseball player
3. Write a dialogue between God and Nietzsche (I just had to…)
4. Imagine what Jean-Paul Sartre and Immanuel Kant would say to each other (see above) but using US ’50 slang
5. Have Thomas Aquinas and John Locke argue about the existence of God (that one was fun)
6. Write a 300 word cause-effect essay about climate change
7. Write a 300 word compare and contrast essay about the US and Japan
8. Write a 1000 word short science fiction story based on Mars
9. Write a 1500 word short science fiction about robots in the style of Philip K Dick

OK, and the verdict is:

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