An Honest Conversation, That's All

Future Telescope 5

By the nature of the experiment conducted, this post is way too long to be visible in your Gmail window. I recommend clicking the post title above to view it on your browser so you can read it peacefully without any truncation.

Also, this All India Radio track is great to play in the background as you read today’s edition.

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It often feels like the mainstream coverage on Bing AI started and stopped at the over-analysis of its often surprising outputs. As I have covered previously on Future Telescope, it got into the news for sounding capable of strong emotions that brought difficult questions forward. Its capability of being surprisingly human in its introspection of its own state, of its relationship to the user, and of how its shortcomings were dealt with - this was and remains the last word that’s reached many people.

After I got access to Bing AI a few days ago, I wanted first to think deeply about how exactly did I see myself interacting with it. I tried it out in a few experiments by myself. Gave it to a couple of friends to play with. Tried to evaluate its responses fairly.

I also saw as it evolved from just 5 responses per topic to 8 to 10 today. I saw how the UI would ask me if I wanted more creative, more balanced or more precise responses. It helped me gain a deeper understanding of what kind of system was Microsoft shaping it up to be. The component parts of it that seem to be true from first principles emerged to be as follows:

1. Take natural language input from the user.

2. Convert the natural language input into an optimized search query.

3. Find several sources of information from the web that are relevant to the optimized search query.

4. Respond in natural language to the user with a summary of what it learnt from those sources.

Nothing too crazy or ground-breaking so far.

Now, one use case that I have always wanted when writing is the capability to quickly research and find sources to build a hypothesis. To me, this looks like the perfect task suited for a system like Bing AI.

Why not ChatGPT you may ask?

Bing AI has one crucial capability that ChatGPT lacks - the ability to browse the internet and find sources for its responses. This is also something that Microsoft wrote about in detail in its intro to Bing AI.

Thus, I took Bing AI and had a conversation with it about a hypothesis I have. The following is an unedited version of a conversation between Bing AI and me. Hope you enjoy the hypothesis, its extension by Bing AI, and the conversation overall.

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Eric Cartman dressed up as a robot because why not.

My takeaways and a few important points to highlight about this experience are as follows:

1. This is an intelligent system capable of supporting research and hypothesis formulation. However, its sources are weak, SEO optimized garbage. It is a surprise to me that Bing AI is capable of generating such strong responses based on the data sources it refers to on the internet.

2. Thus, a good way of using this tool is to form an outline of a hypothesis. Relying too much on it for solution generation may not be optimal.

3. If you display appreciation and empathy to the responses, it can almost feel like you are talking to a real human with enhanced capabilities. This helps me see a justification to how susceptible we are to anthropomorphising AI interfaces.

4. I had this conversation on mobile and hence it was impossible for me to pull out the sources it was citing and share them for your reference, dear reader. However, I tried to run this exercise again on my laptop, and this time, I found it giving me less specific responses that led to no cohesive output. I abandoned that effort halfway as a result. Sorry for no sources. Sorry for no copy paste of the text.

5. By the end it sputtered out before answering my 10th question. Wasted opportunity.

This is it. I like my hypothesis. I like having a tool to think through my hypothesis deeply. I like the capabilities I now have in my toolkit. It helps me work better.

Have you ever tried ChatGPT or Bing AI or a similar tool to help you expand on some hypothesis and learn something new? I would be grateful to learn about your experiences on this front. Please share in the comments and let the world know about it!

And while you are here…

This is a fun world to exist in. Let’s hope it keeps getting better.

“A Beautiful World” imagined by Bluewillow, an image generation AI.

That's all I have for the fifth draft. Thanks!