Dumb phones. Dumber ChatGPT!
When a Chatbot can't get the 'Life gives you lemons' adage right...
A few days ago I noticed this at Walmart: Flip Phones (or ‘Dumb phones’) as they are affectionately called. They’re everywhere. Amazon lists many Dumb Phones (lots of Nokias, and a model called CatS22, a rugged device with Google Assistant.) These are phones with no apps. I also saw a New Yorker piece that ‘The dumb phone boom is real.’ What do you think of this shift happening before our eyes? Are we finally pushing back against Silicon Valley’s constant rolling out of overpriced devices we don’t need?
Split Screen Life
And then, on a podcast by Atlantic magazine, there was this disturbing and funny story (I wasn’t sure which aspect was more riveting) where the host was interviewing her son who insisted on text-chatting with someone while being interviewed. She was trying to get him to not split his attention, but that itself turned into the topic of phones wrecking our conversations, big time.
On a related note…
Do check out Jonathan Haidt’s latest book, titled The Anxious Generation, packed with new research about a kids mired by mental illness. A generation who have had their brains rewired, courtesy of their (us) parents who bought them phones when they were way too young—some around 10. These kids are now in their late teens and early twenties. So I’m not surprised that the ‘dumb phone’ is making a comeback.
AI’s Go-Back-To-School Moment
This week made me feel that we are as ready for superintelligent AI, just as much as we are ready for driverless cars that don’t run over people. Here’s how ChatGPT ‘knows’ the alphabet.
Besides missing out the letters G and O, whatever is that letter after the letter F, and before T?
My Continuing Experiment with AI
I teach students how to use and manipulate graphics. A few of them are using CoPilot (from the search engine, Bing) to design images for their eBooks. This semester I have them try out Adobe Express instead of Canva, which has similar features. One of these features is generative AI. And so, I had to check the feature out.
My first prompt was ‘Bull in a chinashop.’ Here’s the best it could come up with.
It completely misses the point. Why am I not surprised?
My next was an aphorism. I thought this would be so much simpler to generate, since the concept of a bull that wrecks the place may be somewhat hard to fathom by an ‘intelligence’ not as sharp as our human micro-processors.
Here’s what it gave me for the prompt, “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.”
C’mon, generative AI. This is embarrassing.
And if you like to know more as to why we are in this mired space, watch this interview by the Wall Street Journal’s Joanna Stern talking to OpenAI’s new CTO, Mira Murati. “OpenAI Made me Crazy.” WSJ: March 13, 2024.
These two examples above aren’t just ‘hallucinations’—they’re just plain incompetence.
What do you think?