Day: January 12, 2023

More About AI ChatBots

Fandango18 Comments

There have been quite a few posts in our WordPress community recently about ChatGPT, artificial intelligence chatbots, and whether or not such chatbots have the potential, at some point, to be good enough to take the place of us human bloggers.

I was curious about the AI-generated content, ChatGPT, and chatbots, and whether they are all that they are cracked up to be. So I downloaded an app called Genie to my iPhone. Genie is an OpenAl ChatGPT powered by GPT-3. I opened up the app and typed “Write a story with the words premonition, trance, vinyl, scud, sock, and trendy.” Here’s the post that the chatbot generated.

I also posed this question, “What would happen if Al surpassed human intelligence?” on this week’s Provocative Question prompt, which generated some interesting responses. One such response was this one from blogger Kajmeister. It’s long, but informative, interesting, and if you are at all intrigued about AI chatbots, well worth the read.

One interesting experiment Kajmeister conducted was to run a few paragraphs of my entirely chatbot-generated post through an AI detector model to see if it picked up on the AI-generated content. And the results were interesting.

Yes, the bullshit AI detector determined that the probability of those paragraphs having been written by a chatbot were 99.98%. Excellent detecting work, AI detector.

So, I decided to take two recent posts of mine that I actually wrote without the assistance of a chatbot, and run them through this AI detector. Here are the results below.

99.98% “real” on the first sample, but only 89.19% “real” on the second sample. Maybe my post comparing Dunkin’ Donuts to Krispy Kreme doughnuts was a bit more robotically written. Or maybe the AI detector was pissed that I prefer Krispy Kreme to Dunkin’ Donuts.

Next on my list of things to waste time doing is to write a post and try to see if I can fool the AI detector into thinking it was written by a chatbot. Yeah, that’s the ticket!

Doughnut Versus Donut

Fandango28 Comments

I spent much of my adult life in Dunkin’ Donuts country (aka Massachusetts). My idea of the perfect doughnut was forged by the variety of delicious treats that graced the shelves of my local Dunkin’ Donuts establishment.

I loved to stop at Dunkin’ Donuts on my way to work for a cup of hot coffee and a doughnut. But I admit that I’d rarely tasted any other establishment’s doughnuts, so I had little by way of comparison.

Around 20 years ago I was on a business trip in North Carolina. An associate of mine who lived in the area picked me up early one morning at the hotel and, as we were driving to the meeting, I asked him if he knew where the nearest Dunkin’ Donuts was.

He gave me a quizzical look because he was unfamiliar with Dunkin’ Donuts. “You want to stop and get a doughnut?” he asked. “There’s a Krispy Kreme near here. We can stop there.”

I’d never heard of Krispy Kreme before, but since I hadn’t had time for coffee or to eat anything before he picked me up, I agreed.

My world was rocked that morning. Never had I experienced anything as light and airy as a Krispy Kreme doughnut. It was like eating a sweet, delicious, glazed cloud.

Sorry Dunkin’. We had a good thing going, but your heavy, cakey doughnuts don’t cut it next to those incredibly delicious Krispy Kreme doughnuts. Especially when they’re fresh and hot from the cooker. Oh yum!

That said, the coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts is better than the coffee at Krispy Kreme. Sadly, where I live now in the San Francisco Bay Area, Dunkin’ Donuts and Krispy Kreme Doughnut stores are few and far between. But there are great cupcakes shops galore, so I’m surviving.

Written for Linda G. Hill’s JusJoJan prompt — my first of the year — where today’s word, suggested by Liz Husebye Hartmann, is “donut.”

Rory’s Morning Dawdler — 01/12/23

Fandango9 Comments

Rory, the king of questions, also known as the Autistic Composter, has come up with a new series of questions that he calls “The Morning Dawdler.” He poses four questions three times a week, questions he says are “inspired by life, humor, conversations and observations, town life, blog posts, writers, gardening, news stories, television, entertainment, and human curiosity, and so on.”

Here are Rory’s four morning dawdler questions for today.

What is the most important meal to your day and why?

“They” say that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. But I don’t agree with “them.” I think it’s the one you eat when you’re hungry. I’ve found that when I’m not hungry, no meal seems nearly as important as it does when I am hungry.

How many bananas do you eat a week or do you not?

I slice a banana and put it in my cold cereal, which I eat every morning. So, using my higher math skills, my answer is seven.

Do you think self-help books actually help or hinder?

I don’t know. I have never read a self-help book in my life. But I am the type of man who likes to help himself, so maybe I should write one.

Should we all be more social and not enjoy solitude so much?

Who am I to advice people whether or not they should be more social or enjoy their solitude? Personally I’m on the solitude side of the ledger, but for others, it’s whatever floats your boat.

WDP — Youthful Attachments

Fandango34 Comments

Describe an item you were incredibly attached to as a youth. What became of it?

I’ve written about this before, but as long as you’re asking…

When I was a lad, I used to collect superhero comic books, baseball cards, and my two favorite humor magazines, MAD and National Lampoon.

The comic books, mostly superhero-type comics from DC Comics and Marvel, cost ten cents each back then. MAD and National Lampoon were a quarter each. The packs of baseball cards, sold by Topps and Fleet, cost a nickel each and included seven baseball cards and a flat, square piece of pink bubblegum.

Each month when the new editions were published, I would ride my bike to the comic book store/newsstand in town, where I’d buy five comic books and two packages of baseball cards. I’d ride my bike back home and take the wrappers off of the packages of baseball cards and sort them out. And after reading the comic books, I’d stack them in piles based upon the characters.

I continued to buy baseball cards and comic books for years until I got distracted when I was about 17 by girls. But in the meantime, I had built up a significant collection of both comic books and baseball cards.

I kept the more recent comic book issues in my bedroom and the older issues in the basement of my parents’ home, along with my cherished baseball cards.

What became of my prized collections of comic books and baseball cards? It’s a sad story, actually. After high school I headed off to college for four years. When I returned home after graduating, I discovered that my vast — and priceless — collections of both comic books and baseball cards were missing.

I asked my father about them and he told me that he had thrown them away, explaining that he needed the space in the basement for some other purpose. “Besides,” he said, “that was kid stuff. You’re an adult now.”

We Need To Talk

Fandango8 Comments

Patrick’s life was shattered. After working for the company for almost thirty years, he just got laid off. He felt completely lost and overwhelmed and had no idea what to do next. He tried to tell himself that it was okay to feel that way under the circumstances, but he also knew he couldn’t stay in this state of mind for too long. He just needed to take the time to pause, reflect, and decide what to do next.

But that was likely going to be a daunting task. Trying to figure out, with all of the staff reductions going on in the tech industry, how a 55-year-old man could find something suitable boggled his mind. He had horrible visions of having to resort to taking a job as a greeter at Walmart and that made him feel sick to his stomach.

Even worse, how was he going to break the news to his wife? She would be disappointed and maybe even worried, but he was pretty sure she would also be sympathetic. But not so much his mother-in-law, who had moved in with them when her husband passed away last year. He could just hear her witch-like cackle as she once again reminded her daughter, “I told you that you should never have married him. He’s such a loser.”

“Listen,” Patrick said to his wife, Alicia, when he called her from the car after he left the building, “We need to talk about something that happened at work, but I don’t want your mother to be a part of that discussion. Is there something you can do to keep her distracted when you and I talk?”

“I just saw something on Twitter about massive layoffs at your company,” Alicia said. “Is that what you need to talk with me, about? If it is, don’t worry, we’ll get through this, even if I have to pawn my diamond engagement ring and some other jewelry to make ends meet. And yes, I’ll handle my mother. She’s the last thing you need to be concerned about right now. I love you, Patrick. We’ll manage.”

Written for these daily prompts: Fandango’s One Word Challenge (shattered), The Daily Spur (decide), Ragtag Daily Prompt (boggle), Your Daily Word Prompt (cackle), Word of the Day Challenge (distracted), and My Vivid Blog (diamond).