I Got the Bada Bing — I Just Don't Get the Bada Boom; or
AI
Is the Accutrac of Our Day
Source: Dispatcher's Imagination
(There is still is hope for illustrators who are smarter than the AI.)
Monday, February 27, 2023, late in the afternoon came the announcement in email. The Gnomes of Redmond had granted me access to the new Bing AI. It simply happened. I did not make any of the recommended system changes to be moved up. I simply moved in.
Because I already have a Microsoft account, there wasn't any hoops to jump through to get to Bing. Except one small issue. Google Chrome is my default browser. After verifying the links in the email were legitimate, I simply clicked. And I was prompted with something like "Don't you want to use Edge for this?" That seemed both fair, it's Microsoft's product. From a technical point of view, I am certain Edge is a better choice. I copied links from the email into Edge and away I went.
The Bing Main screen is a very clean and uncluttered layout. The prompt invites the visitor to type a question into the prompt.
One aesthetical difference in how the search session is displayed with Bing when compared to ChatGPT is that the sequence of prompt and response looks like any other texting interface. With your typed text offset from the response. This feature also helps keep track of where a user might be in the chat session. It is helpful.
I always begin my testing of AI with a couple of questions from history where there should be enough content relative to the topic available from the Internet. More importantly for testing purposes, I ask a question that I already have an idea of what might be an acceptable response. There is a renewed interest among the Committariat in the fracturing and eventual dissolution of the Whig party leading up to American Civil War. Slavery was a major issue for all parties in the Antebellum Period. Again, and like ChatGPT, if you did not know anything about the Whig Party, the answer offered by Bing would be one place to begin research.
The Promise of Bing is that the response would come with citations and
notes. Indeed Bing does cite its sources. That is an
improvement. The topic of the dissolution of the Whig Party came
with many relevant and useful sources were referenced and hyperlinked.
The sources are referenced and linked in the Learn more:
section.
I tried another less well known topic that is once again contemporary
American political discussions. There is a renewed interest in
what is called "The Republican Synthesis" (small r) among historical and
political circles. The ideas that formed the Republican Synthesis
fell out of favor in the 1980s and 1990s as the theories associated the
the Republican Synthesis were thought to be too "jingoistic;"
and smacked as too much "American
Exceptionalism." The Republican Synthesis represents
one school of thought about the Why of the American Revolution, and its
critics contend that the Republican Synthesis school does not take into
account the economic reasons for the American Revolution, as expressed
by
Charles Beard. I offer the text above not as
a history lesson, but to illustrate this is an issue with salience in
any study of early American History. There should be at least as
much information to reference as in the Whig Party Question. But
Bing couldn't handle it, really.
The discussion of the Republican Synthesis was very thin, indeed.
Bing did hit the highlights, but lacked references to any of the
historians associated with the theory. One feature Bing did offer,
to expand the prompt to the Republican Synthesis to its impact on the
American Revolution, would be helpful, again if you knew nothing going
in.
The citations here were very disappointing, though. Remember how
your Mother used to tell you to go look the meaning of that word
yourself in a dictionary? Well, when Bing doesn't really have a
good and wide collection of sources to cite, Bing tells its users to go
look it up in Wikipedia. Yes, that is always a good idea, but why
not simply start your search at Wikipedia? Furthermore, the
failure to mention at least these two American historians,
Bernard Bailyn and
Gordon Wood, and their books that most popularized the Republican
Synthesis, shows how little knowledge the AI actually knows. And
it serves as an example of why the Large Language Models just aren't
ready for mass marketing yet. If one does serious Internet research, AI
is still an experimental tool: a model. All AIs, in the words of Dan Diasio, accounting firm, Ernst & Young's global artificial intelligence
consulting leader, "intrinsically are word prediction engines. At its most
basic level, it’s just predicting the next best word."
Right now, as is the current State of the Art, the AI guesses too
many wrong words.
Of course, for me, much like
anyone, the real question is "What about me?"
Well, Bing did know that Gerald Reiff has an independent website and
music publishing concern called NiteBluz Music. More than ChaptGPT
knew, but it still went downhill a little from there.
Well, now we are cooking with gas. It knows I run a thing called NiteBluz Music. Both Bing and ChatGPT referenced things I did on the Internet 3 years ago that I thought were was cancelled. Once you pay, it stays. In 2020, I placed 5 songs with a website called CD Baby that would distribute the 5 songs to almost all the free music sites. One of these music sites was YouTube, I guess. I gave up on that part of the project. Went to my own website.
Bing should know about the songs on YouTube, since it gave the YouTube channel as reference. Bing knew I had songs on YouTube that I weren't aware of. Here things just got nonsensical. I first searched on the song Give Some To Me. Bing knew this song. Even gave a favorable review of sorts. It is a rockin' kind of tune with a longer guitar solo than many other of my songs. "Catchy pop song" is good. Except the first verse is about the ruining of the American economy; and the second verse is about the ruining of American Culture. The final verse states that if we humans don't stop destroying the planet, Mother Earth, like all organisms, will protect itself. I don't think that's so upbeat. Hey, I don't care what Bing says. It spelled the name right.
Bing also was aware of a the second song I prompted for. Sweet Shiver Suite is on Bing's playlist. Bing knows that Gerald Reiff is the composer. And Herr Reiff, according to Bing, is from Austria. So Auctung, AI!
Lastly, I prompted for the song "Well Worth the Wait." Although it was Bing that sent me to YouTube to play or download Well Worth the Wait, the tune was not on Bing's playlist.
It is simply unfathomable that the AI would be aware of two songs from the same YouTube channel, but not a third. Again, this is less an exercise in ego deflation than it is test to the AI against what it claims to know, and in fact, does not know. Although, Bing did know NiteBluz Music and Gerald Reiff, it did not know this domain or website. Bing made the same error that will happen in any search for eppresents.com. There is an E1presents that often gets cross referenced incorrectly.
I asked to search the URL that you, my Dear Reader, are on right now. So what and how did this AI search for the domain name "eppresents.com" and NOT get to the right web location? Google search will list this website first; Nitebluz second, and e1presents.com third.
Apparently, Microsoft has tamed my Bing from its earlier iterations. I tried, as much as I could, to argue about the web address my Bing just got plain wrong. Bing, would not, however, take my bait. In fact, my Bing refused to fixate on any one issue. The machine will simply say, in effect, "I am done here;" and will not entertain the onset of an argument. Of course, I wonder about any person who deliberately take up an argument with a machine.
Much has been written about Bing's alternate personas and the names given to those different personas. Well, my Bing ain't no Sydney. My Bing seems to know that it is a machine whose name is Bing. I didn't go looking for its obnoxious siblings, also about which much has been written.
It is not so much that this technology is broken. The technology is simply not ready for mass marketing and mass distribution. The confusion in the marketplace about this technology is the byproduct of AI being over promised and over sold. It does not work as advertised — at least, not yet. It doesn't work correctly now. That does not mean, however, that it will never work.
In the late 1970s, there was a record player that was going to Revolutionize Your Musical Enjoyment Beyond Your Wildest Imagination. The device was called the Accutrac 3500. The Accutrac 3500 was a record changer that would accommodate up to 6 LPS. The spindle part record changer would rotate up and down to put any one of the LPs stacked up in play. It was also the first digitally programmable device that I had ever tried to use that was not called a calculator. I emphasize TRIED TO USE because not a single one of those $400 machines, in 1977 dollars, ever actually worked at all. BSR, the manufacturer, advertised the Accutrac wherever an ad for audio equipment made sense. And, in the 1970s, that was everywhere. Our retail executives advertised them week after week. Customers flocked to the stores on Sunday morning first thing to buy one. We retail store people, including top commissioned salesperson yours truly, begged customers not to buy an Accutrac. They simply destroyed the LPs with the grabber mechanism of the changer — that is, whenever it would actually work. We would take the customers into our Go Backs area and show them all the defective Accutracs going back to the warehouse. "That's why I don't have one in stock," we would tell these determined buyers. We had exchanged them all; and the exchange units wouldn't work. And, yet, customers would still ask, "Well, can I pay for one now and get on the list?" The Accutrac 3500 pictured above was shortlived. Then BSR brought out a one LP at a time version, the Accutrak 4000. The microprocessor never worked on that one. We in the store called the damn thing the AccuSuck. But that was a different product. We didn't sell that.
Fast forward less than 10 years. The Compact Disk quickly
surpassed vinyl LPs in sales. Furthermore, the CD was a digital medium
from birth.
It could count tracks. The new technology, the CD, realized
and put into practical use the idea of the Accutrac.
Digital
technology is always advancing forward. Someday we may have Star
Trek's computer. A machine that humans can ask simply questions and
get reliable answers from like:
"Computer how many light years is the nearest
nebula where The Enterprise could hide from the
approaching Borg Collective." We aren't there, yet. But we
are moving in that direction. And despite the current limitations of the
technology, the Bing AI overall is a step forward toward the goal.
I am just not sure if anyone involved in the AIs know what is
the ultimate destination for their products. Nonetheless, as long as
I don't have to pay for
their product development, I don't mind participating. I have been on
the leading edge of technology since my teens. Why stop now just
because I am old fart with a better working knowledge of this industry
than the thirty-somethings wasting their time romancing or confronting
the AI? I think that says more about the humans than it does the
technology.