(Picture by Possessed Photography via UnSplash)
Following up my previous blog, in which ChatGPT decided that I had died twice – in 2019 and then again in 2020 – I decided to see what else I had done in my life.
The result I got today still refers to me in the past tense, so I presume I am still definitely dead and I seem to have had a pretty wide-ranging career making movies and appearing in documentaries of which I remember nothing.
I also seem to have been a BBC Radio producer without knowing about it.
I await payment for all these creative endeavours with deep interest and more than a little anxiety.
ChatGPT told me:
All of that was and is a mystery to me though, thank gawd, there was no mention of the movie which dare not speak its name.
Anyway, nothing ventured, nothing gained.
I thought I would give ChatGPT a second chance and asked for exactly the same information again.
This time I got a far more personal-sounding response:
So my fantastic 20-25 year career in television apparently was just that – a fantasy. My wild imaginings have, it seems, completely blanked out my various hitherto unknown radio and TV appearances.
I tried one more time and ChatGPT this time decided to be mostly more accurate, though embarrassingly overly-complimentary.
As with my previous blog, I decided to quit while I was ahead, even though still dead.
Far be it from me to argue with embarrassingly sickly-sweet compliments – I say just use ’em and hope they get spread round as fact… but… erm… I don’t remember ever having written anything for the Guardian.
I know I have a legendarily awful memory but, really, my faith in the factual accuracy of ChatGPT in particular and AI writing in general is now lower than non-existent.
Yes, I know that is impossible. But we are in a strange, brave new world that has such chatbots in it…
SO IT GOES - John Fleming's blog 