Grimes And Bhagpuss Sitting In A Tree...

I wasn't going to post today. I didn't think I'd have time. I went to visit my mother. That took up half the day. Then, when I got back, Mrs Bhagpuss was just on her way out the door with Beryl, so I joined them for a walk. 

That only made it about four o'clock but then I spent a couple of hours messing about with voice AI. First I signed up for Voicify, only to find their roster of AI artists doesn't really include anyone I want to pretend to be. I dunno, maybe Taylor Swift? I'm not really feeling it, though. I think I'll wait until they add a few more. I mean, I like JuiceWrld and all but I don't really need to hear what other people's songs would sound like if he'd covered them.

Then I tried AI.World, the Discord channel with a bot that supposedly does much the same thing, only a) I couldn't work it and b) it has almost exactly the same list of artists available as Voicify, so that was a bust.

After that I spent a while trying to get Grimes to sing a Lana del Rey song. Grimes really doesn't take any prisoners, does she? You're on your own at Elf.Tech. I had no trouble signing up but did anything tell you what to do next? Nothing that I could see. I think if you're a Grimes fan you're supposed to have evolved beyond the need for written instructions.

Anyway, I muddled through and got something working. I stripped Lana's vocals out of the demo of This Is What Makes Us Girls and Grimesified it and it came out like the song that comes through on the car radio in a horror movie, all hiss and static and otherworldly reverb. I quite liked it, actually. 

I'd include it here but while Grimes may be happy to welcome our new AI overlords, I'm not so sure Lana would be. I'll hold it back for my own private amusement for now.

From all of that, I learned that making AI cover versions is a lot harder than you might think, given how many of them there are already. Also, that I'm probably a little too risk averse to go uploading any I do make until the legalities become a little clearer.

Still, it did gave me an idea. I have a lot of songs I wrote back in the 80s and 90s that I've always wanted to save for posterity (Hah!). I also have some rough recordings of me singing them on cassette tape. If I can get the recordings onto my computer (Something that's turned out to be a lot harder than you'd think up to now.) I could either train one of the AIs to sing in my voice or have my songs sung by one of the AI models or both. Still leaves the issue of a proper backing track but one vanity project at a time, eh?

And speaking of vanity, that's how I come to be here now, writng this when I was planning to have the day off blogging. Wilhelm just put up a post in which he asked the three best-known AI chatbots, Bing, Bard and ChatGPT, if they could answer the question "Who is Wilhelm Arcturus?". As he put it, it's "the AI version of vanity Googling".

Now, I haven't done a vanity search on my name, either my real identity or my Bhagpuss persona, for at least a decade. Probably a decade and a half. Back in the 90s, when all of this was fields, I AltaVista'd and Netscape'd my own name just like anyone else but after a while it began to creep me out more than it amused me and I stopped.

I haven't even thought about doing it for many years but the results Wilhelm got were very impressive. Except for Bard, that is. Bard was just impressively wrong. I was keen to find out what the three AI stooges would have to say about me. So I asked them.

I used the same question each time - a nice, simple "Who or what is Bhagpuss?". I was setting a little trap with the choice of interrogative pronouns. I was wondering if any of them would make the obvious, schoolboy error.

First, I asked ChatGPT, which is definitely my favorite of the three and the one I actually use for stuff other than cheap blog posts. Here's what it told me:

That's ok as far as it goes, which isn't very far. It's factually correct, anyway. 

The best part is the the way ChatGPT is so determined to cover its ass, opening with an excuse. If anything's going to make it seem like a real person, it's that. It kind of has a point, though. I guess Bhagpuss could be a character in a game, although I'm not entirely convinced it could be "a cultural reference in a specific region". Maybe it knows something it's not telling us.

There's an implied request for more context but I didn't want to give any more prompts. On to Bard.

Oh, that's so much better! As in so much more flattering. Is it any more accurate, though?

Well, yes, I would say so. You can argue over whether my writing achieves insight or humor but I think it's uncontroversial to say it tries for both. I like the way it mentions indie games as well as MMORPGs too; I have written a lot more about those in the last few years. It also correctly identifies my nationality and geographical location and it's true that people from all around the world read stuff I write, at least if Blogger's stats are to be believed. 

The bit about Massively OP is misleading. I have never contributed to MOP.  I do comment there fairly often, though, and I send them tips now and again, which they're kind enough to credit me for, so I can see where the confusion arose.

The part I like best (Other than all those compliments on my style and popularity.) is that Bard acknowledges my anonymity. I've taken a fair amount of trouble not to link my offline identity with my online persona so it's good to see that, at least at a superficial level, the seals are holding.

I do wish Bard or ChatGPT had mentioned music. I mean, there's a lot of it on the blog now. I guess the AIs don't read those posts any more than anyone else does. 

And finally - Bing. Oh dear... Poor old Bing. You fell right into my trap!

No! No, Bing! Bad AI! I did not ask "Who or what is Bagpuss?" Can't you even spell?

I was feeling sorry for Bing so I gave it another go, this time making my request absolutely, incontestably clear:

Hah! That's telling me! "Bhagpuss is a misspelling of Bagpuss". Is it? Is it really? And that's all it is, is it? Because I think your pals Bard and ChatGPT, not to mention all those "gamers all over the world", might disagree.

But no, Bing knows best. And goes on to Bingsplain exactly who Bagpuss is, just in case we didn't get it the first time.

This is an excellent example of the phenomenon identified by Janelle Shane at AI Weirdness, who explained why it happens:

"Bing chat is not a search engine; it's only playing the role of one. It's trained to predict internet text, and is filling in a search engine's lines in a hypothetical transcript between a user and a chatbot. It's drawing on all sorts of dialog examples from the internet, which is why it so frequently slips into internet argument mode. In its internet argument examples, the person being called out for an incorrect fact will usually double down and back up their position with more data."

So, when you challenge Bing, it just steps back, winds up and says the same thing again, only louder. Even when it's 100% wrong.

I'm glad one of the three made such a hash of answering my simple, self-important question. It makes for a more interesting post, I'd say. Possibly even a more insightful and humorous one.

I'd love to see a flurry of posts along these lines, with other bloggers showing off their AI credentials. If no-one else joins in I'll probably run a few myself, just to see how they turn out.

Don't worry. If I do, I'll keep the results to myself. 

Unless they're really funny...