Dualtronic

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Generative AI and I

Sometime in 2000 or 2001 I discovered A.L.I.C.E. and the Artificial Intelligence Markup Language. I was immediately interested and tried to make my own chatbot. The friends I showed it to misread my e-mail, dissed my attempt and didn't even try to make an honest effort. Nobody cared to converse with a machine. I gave up and never looked into it again.

Fast forward ten years or so. Every corporate website has a chatbot in a box on the homepage acting as tech support. I can't be arsed to talk to one for any reason. Anecdotally, nobody else does either. I occasionally interact with Alex the Parrot on ifMUD, because Alex is funny for a change and often useful. He's also based on a really old IRC bot (probably Infobot). But that's a rare exception.

Another decade goes by. Generative AI takes the world by storm. Suddenly everyone loves chatbots and uses them for everything. Funny that. Turns out they're cool after all when a corporation is shoving them down your throat. Cutting down a tree for every reply is a bonus. Guess it makes people feel powerful or something.

Even my elderly uncle owns a virtual assistant. He uses it to put on music from internet radio stations and stuff like that.

You'd think generative AI has won. Everyone uses it for everything. Even coding. Soon we won't need programmers anymore! People have been dreaming of that since before Cobol was invented, you know.

I'm sometimes tempted to play with this stuff again. Not the forest burning machines, mind you; but you can code an ELIZA clone in like a hundred lines of Logo and a simple Markov chain in twenty lines of Python. Could train it on my work and/or public domain books. See what it spits out. Just for fun.

Turns out it's a lot easier and more insightful to simply re-read my old writing. As for chatting with the computer, I've been doing that since before graphical user interfaces were widespread. It's called a command line.

Try it out sometime. It really does change the way you work with the machine.