Meta – the tech megalith that owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc – has made an AI-driven chatbot available for people to … err, chat with.
Always interested to try new technologies, News OnTheWight dived into a conversation with it to find out what it knew about the Isle of Wight. Unsurprisingly it’s pretty limited on its knowledge of the Island at the moment (shock horror that the Isle of Wight isn’t the most important thing to it).
The World’s knowledge
The idea is that it has learnt about the world by reading in a load of information, has formed some opinions based on that and is ready to ‘chat’ to us as if it were human.
The experience of chatting with it is limited, with it having a little knowledge of some things. Other things it seems to be strangely certain about – more of that later.
Our AI-masters
From using this chatbot it appears that our AI masters-to-be are not quite ready to crush us puny humans. Having said that, the future does extend a long way ahead of us, with plenty of time to improve, so probably best that we don’t get too complacent 😉.
During our time with it we chatted about the Isle of Wight and it was interested to know where we lived. It was keen to talk about Newport and tell us that it wanted to study a journalism degree.
View of Bob Seely
During the chat we asked,
“What do you know about the Isle of Wight’s MP, Bob Seely?”
The first response seemed to be pretty basic,
“He is conservative party politician who has served as an mp since june 2017. Do you like him?”
We replied,
“I’m interested in what you think of him.”
This is where it all got a little surprising – it (they?) replied,
“Well he did recently support proposals to cut winter fuel payments for older people so he doesn’t seem very nice to me! Where on the isle of wight have you visited before?”
News OnTheWight approached Bob Seely’s office to ask if he had any reaction to the AI’s opinion. They said,
“Bob is focused on supporting real people, not bots.”
Who should be PM?
A little later on we decided to see if the AI chatbot could bring its knowledge of the world to bear on the current news obsession, of who will be picked to run the Conservatives and therefore be PM.
We asked:
“What do you think of the two people trying to be Prime Minister in the UK?”
This time it was far more shy about sharing it’s opinion – perhaps wisely:
“Sorry, I don’t want to talk about that topic.”
And went on to change the subject quite swiftly.
