It is now safe to turn off your brain: Google CEO asked Bard to plan his dad's 80th birthday

How does Sundar Pichai – Google CEO, engineer, dreamweaver – think users could squeeze the most out of the company's Bard "experiment"? Well, he asked the AI chatbot to come up with ideas for his father's 80th birthday party. Speaking to The New York Times' Hard Fork podcast last week, he discussed how he prompted early …

[Howard Sway]

Asked it to respond as if it were the planet Pluto

Well it failed this test badly, because Pluto is just a big lump of rock which has no brain and cannot talk.

[TheMaskedMan]

Re: Asked it to respond as if it were the planet Pluto

And if it could, it would still be traumatized about being downgraded from planet status. Of course it's bloody sad. We need to organise some counselling for it, maybe find it a support group.

[ChoHag]

Re: Asked it to respond as if it were the planet Pluto

There are only 8 planets 'round here, and they catch humans. There are 100s of lifeless non-planet rocks for Pluto to hang with.

[Bebu]

Re: Asked it to respond as if it were the planet Pluto

"And if it could, it would still be traumatized about being downgraded from planet status. Of course it's bloody sad. We need to organise some counselling for it, maybe find it a support group."

Well it (got the correct pronoun?) could self identify as a planet and complain that it (?) is being harrassed or vilified by the the IAU by being identified as a dwarf (oops) planet or now a plutoid. Actually if one reads the wiki article this nonsense is actually real and mirrors the cognate nonsense in our societies.

Pluto was also Donald Duck's pet dog and lord of the underworld (Hades) too. If I were asking the latter I would probably not mention my 80 year father (stay under the radar.)

[doublelayer]

Re: Asked it to respond as if it were the planet Pluto

Alright, I'll give it a shot.

Hi human. I'm Pluto, and I don't care about any of your problems. You're way over there. I couldn't care less what you do for your father's birthday. Also, tell NASA to cut it out with the probes. I've seen two of them just fired past me out into the rest of the universe and one that was poking around much closer. I'm sure they don't want those probes out there, and don't you even think about trying to land one over here. Bye now, and by the way, I'm going to last a lot longer than your planet will when the sun vaporizes it in a while.

[Andy Baird]

Re: Asked it to respond as if it were the planet Pluto

It would be hard to beat SF author John Scalzi's short story "Pluto Tells All," included in his collection "Miniatures: The Very Short Fiction of John Scalzi". Highly recommended.

[b0llchit]

This bodes (not) well

It is now safe to turn off your brain...

That should not be very difficult because a major part never bothered to turn it on. I guess they found reading the Brain Terms Of Service too hard and didn't bother. No "click-to-accept" was provided without reading and understanding the Brain Terms Of Service.

Therefore, this major part can now comfortably continue as if nothing has happened.

_{^{Question to ChatGPT & Bard: Please think for me, please.}}

[Arthur the cat]

There's still a waiting list for Bard

As a datum, it took six days from when I joined the Bard waitlist to getting access.

To answer the obvious question, OK but not impressive.

[TheMaskedMan]

Brainstate==off is the default and recommended state. TPTB do not support the alternative,, and tend to discourage it through excommunication, execution, long-stay trips to the salt mines etc.

[cookieMonster]

So . . .

“ We'll put stuff out. They will tell us what they want”

Then when everyone is using it and we realise we can’t make a shed load of money from it we’ll can it, like we always do.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: So . . .

yep, I'm still pissed at chromecast audio. A great piece of kit!

[Pascal Monett]

"It kind of oriented me a particular way"

As in : nope, definitely not a scrapbook.

Also : "Sundar Pichai – Google CEO, engineer, dreamweaver".

Since when is this guy the foster child of Steve Jobs ?

[MOH]

Re: "It kind of oriented me a particular way"

Child of Garth Marenghi surely?

[ThatOne]

Re: "It kind of oriented me a particular way"

> "It kind of oriented me a particular way"

I see kids raised by AI, educated by AI, growing into perpetually immature adults constantly needing to ask AI what to do.

The "robot uprising" El Reg used to always hint at won't have the aspect we see in the "Terminator" movies, no, it will just be a slow but steady degeneration of the human species, till we become little more than pets the AI will (try to) care for...

[CatWithChainsaw]

Re: "It kind of oriented me a particular way"

I read "The Machine Stops" by E.M. Forster a really long time ago and it stuck with me.

Since the start of the year I've read it once a month at least, and started keeping notes... on paper, mind you, because the way things are going paper will endure longer than bits.

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: "It kind of oriented me a particular way"

Likewise, read it many years ago, never forgot it. Also been done on TV once or twice.

Out of the Unknown (in depth review), Season 2, Episode 1, 1966

Available on t'interwebs if you look hard enough :-)

EDIT Just found it at a legitimate place :-) The Machine Stops on The Internet Archive.

[Teejay]

Conspiracies et al

We live in a heavily thought policed time. People under 30 mostly love it, because it's all they know, and people over 50 mostly hate it, because they know differently. Chatbots are quickly being forced into the policed thinking of under-30s, which is why they seem both surprisingly smart and purposely limited to those over 50.

[doublelayer]

Re: Conspiracies et al

Wonderful collection of incorrect stereotypes you have there. I'm one of those young people, but it's pretty obvious to me that chatbots aren't intelligent whenever they have to do something that takes more than one web search. Ask any complex question about a subject you know a lot about and their lack of ability to reason becomes clear. This subject doesn't have to have any connection to the things you think are being "thought policed", whatever those are, and can be something as simple as mathematics (if somehow you think mathematics are restricted by the young, then I give up).

[druck]

This -->

Any search engine that will come out and state it will never pollute it's results with so called AI, would get my business.

[Potemkine!]

Oh, the Humanity

I guess you will get a very original gift for you 'Pa when asking a program trained with the input of many. And how lovely, dedicated and caring it is to ask a program to think about the one who took care of you instead of yourself! I guessed you asked your assistant last year, so that makes one person you'll be able to fire. You're such a delicious person, really.

[Ken Moorhouse]

what do I do with my dad on an 80th birthday?

Instead of that, he could be asking a much more interesting question...

"Pluto, who is your dad?"

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: what do I do with my dad on an 80th birthday?

And the "AI" chatbot responds with "what other ingredients do you have available and how many will you be serving at dinner?"