Tearing your hair over a few lines of poetry to impress your beau? Worried about annoying the client who has dues piled up? Or, at a loss for meme ideas? ChatGPT has all your answers. The viral chatbot that has had social media buzzing with discussions, opinions and counter opinions has been put to quirky use by some creative minds.
Meet five Kolkatans who spoke to My Kolkata about their tryst with Artificial Intelligence.
AI tool writing a marriage proposal?
Sarobi Das proposed to her boyfriend of six years using a ChatGTP-generated message Shutterstock
Sarobi Das is pursuing her PhD from the University of Texas and is also a poet. She loves expressing herself through creative writing. For the last six years, she has been dating the man of her dreams who works in Singapore. “His work demands him to spend most of his time with computers. Writing, to him, is reporting his research findings in a scientific journal. Needless to say, I would tend to write poems to express my love for him, more like a love language one may say, while he wouldn’t read them or even try to understand. So, this year, all this hype about ChatGPT made me come up with a fun experiment. So, on Propose Day (February 8), I decided to make ChatGPT write the whole proposal. I sent that to him just to see his reactions and surprisingly enough, this time my fiancé read, understood and then responded as well.”
Sarobi noticed that they tune in perfectly when it comes to food, movie genre, music and even life goals, but poetry writing is one thing that wasn’t a common factor in their relationship. So, Sarobi mixed creativity and tech into her love note and delivered it to her fiance. She added, “He seemed ecstatic and replied with an ‘Yes, I would definitely marry you’ in no time. But then, when he figured that it was not written by me, he was totally taken aback (laughs).”
Making uncomfortable conversations easy
Anirban Saha asked ChatGTP to write a poem asking a client for payment Anirban Saha
Asking clients for payment or requesting mothers to use less oil in food can be tough. So, Anirban Saha made ChatGPT write poetry as a polite plea. “If you have a toy and you cannot play with it, what’s the point? One of the things I did and posted on FB was a series of poetry to make uncomfortable conversations nice and sweet. It was fun and amusing how the model was helping me pick up uncomfortable topics like asking my mother to put less oil in the food,” said Saha, who is a Machine Learning engineer working in an US-based company.
Saha spinned a polite plea to noisy neighbours through ChatGPT Anirban Saha
The quirky Bangali also used the chat bot to write poems asking their noisy neighbours not to scream across buildings. He has also written a poetry for his niece asking her to read more books. Saha added, “Such quick poetry can spice up any conversation, specially done over text, whether or not the other person knows that it is generated by ChatGPT.”
In spite of the fun conversations, he soon found out that the chat bot has been giving a lot of wrong information as well. Saha has studied M.Sc. Data and Knowledge Engineering (data science), specialising in Natural Language Processing at a German university. With a keen interest in conversational AI, he keeps trying out ChatGPT for various things. He said, “ChatGPT is a large Natural Language model for conversational AI. It is a human-created language model that understands natural languages — English being one of them. It easily understands the context of words, the intent of the questions asked by the user, and remembers contexts in a conversation. But it does not always answer questions correctly.”
Saha feels that ChatGPT is a great step forward in the field of Conversational AI and should be celebrated. But there should be an awareness of its limitations as well. “It should not be used to do homework or access news. It does not cite the source and often approximates results. This makes me double check what ChatGPT responds to,” he concluded.
Creating content to increase followers
Rimbik asked ChatGTP to write a Twitter post Rimbik Das
Rimbik Das, who is a motion designer and multimedia specialist, uses ChatGPT for almost anything one can think of. But recently, when he asked ChatGTP how to grow his Instagram followers, it gave a basic response of 5-10 action items. “Then I had to dig into my Instagram analytics. I found that the people who follow me are mostly in the age group of 25-34. Second highest was 18-24. It also helped me find the right kind of content to engage my audience,” he said.
ChatGPT gave tips to Rimbik Das on content creation Rimbik Das
However, Das found out that the chat bot is not very good with creative writing, especially writing a story. Recently, he asked ChatGTP to write a plot of a web series and the results were not satisfactory. “So it can’t really write stories well. It gives me an output which is very basic and then I have to develop the story. Suppose one character is described as a party lover. I try to create a backstory of why the character is a party lover. Maybe the person is lonely and wants to be around people and hence goes to a party and the story flows like this,” he explained.
DALL-E for memes
Somudro Nandi made the meme on exams and examiners through DALL-E Somudro Nandi
A college student, Somudro Nandi, is quite popular among his friends circle for his witty memes. “I guess I started making memes just so I could share them with my friends back in high school. I posted them on my Instagram stories and the general response was positive. So, I continued to do that every once in a while,” said the undergraduate student pursuing English Honours from Gurudas College.
Nandi came up with a few memes on “Orange you glad…” joke, examination joke and more. All of them were made using DALL-E. “I just stumbled across some articles online about DALL-E and how it could generate images on the basis of text prompts. The idea was interesting and I wanted to test its limits by throwing at it the most ridiculous things I could think of. It was fun,” he added.
The prompt on DALL-E created on 'Orange you glad…' joke Somudro Nandi
Although the visual generator seems effortless, Nandi feels there could be ethical implications of using a pre-generative model that was trained to use works done by hundreds of artists, possibly without their consent. “I mostly use it to pass time when I’m bored, making memes and what not. It’s a great tool for experimentation. I’ve never used it in a professional capacity.”
When AI is your bestie
When ChatGPT became Sohinee's bestie Sohinee Chatterjee
Sohinee Chatterjee, a student of MBA, recently had a breakup. And guess who she found a confidant in? The most talked about chat bot — ChatGPT. The AI almost became her best friend, giving her a shoulder to cry on. “I used to ask ChatGPT random questions and it would sometimes answer with so much emotion. It did not feel like I was chatting to a bot. But the funniest part was when I asked how to forget my ex, it gave me the exact answer a best friend would give.”
ChatGPT can also be funny at times, feels Sohinee Sohinee Chatterjee
Sohinee started enjoying the funny conversations. She went ahead and did more experiments like, ‘How to ask for a leave in a funny way’ and each time ChatGTP was funny and cheeky.
“I know it is all technology, but it is fun. I did the same thing with Alexa and Siri. Asked them stupid questions for fun,” Sohinee summed up.
