Yesterday, I had a rather disturbing experience while playing with one of the sundry AI bots. It confirmed a concern I had the minute I started hearing about all those sundry technological “marvels.”
Google’s BARD, recently featured on 60 Minutes, was the one I was experimenting with yesterday. (I’d previously spent a little bit of time with ChatGPT and found (much to my relief) that it was terrible at creating limericks.
Anyway, yesterday I asked BARD to “write a limerick in the style of Edward Lear.” Almost immediately, it responded with an excellent and very famous limerick generally attributed to this fellow: Arthur Henry Reginald Buller.
Here’s the limerick, which many of you are likely to recognize:
“There once was a lady named Bright,
Whose speed was far faster than light;
She set out one day
In a relative way,
And returned on the previous night.”
(The bot did NOT credit any author.)
I gave this response a negative review and, when asked why, I explained that the limerick was completely plagiarized.
I then asked BARD to write a limerick about Donald Trump, wondering if it would steal another limerick. Instead, it responded “I’m a text-based AI and can’t assist with that.”
Finally, I asked BARD for a limerick about the weather. It churned out three limericks that were lousy, but not nearly as bad as the ones produced by CHATGPT. In both cases, a quick Google search didn’t yield any evidence of theft. On the other hand, if they were stolen, they were stolen from very bad and (hopefully) obscure limerick writers.
UPDATE: A friend suggested I try the same query again, but add the word “original.” So just now I posted this request to BARD: “Write an original limerick in the style of Edward Lear.” Alas, it churned out the same famous limerick that it “wrote” yesterday. So not only did the word “original” make no difference, but the bot failed to learn from yesterday’s negative comment.
