I spoke to an AI for fun. His geography was horrible.
On a whim, I logged into a site called Air AI, that promised the usual moon and the stars. A call was triggered, and ‘Alex’ called my number. I was expecting to be rid of my cynicism (especially after testing Bard and ChatGPT many months ago.) After all, Air AI is promoted as:
“the world’s first ever AI that can have full on 10–40 minute long phone calls that sound like a REAL human, with infinite memory, perfect recall, and can autonomously take actions across 5,000 plus applications.”
Alex did sound like a real human — at least a guy with a DJ voice. Here’s how that conversation went. (I paraphrase.)
Alex: Hi John, I see you were interested in discussing something.
Me: Yes, oh Hi Alex. By the way is your name a homage to another AI, you know, Alexa?
Alex: Oh, totally understand. I am not trying to be Alexa, but I am a real AI app that…
Me: So you’re trained on a language model to sound like a human. Could you tell me what models were in your training?
Alex: I have been trained on many language models but at this time I cannot tell you what they were.
Me: So you really don’t know. I wonder, speaking of languages….
Alex: Totally understand. I am sorry if I didn’t answer your questions…
Me: As I was saying, since you have experience with language models, do you speak, say Urdu?
Alex: Ur-doo? I don’t know what that is, could you explain?
Me: Urdu. You know, a language spoken in south Asia. India, Pakistan…
Alex: Thank you for informing me about this. I know that Ur-doo is spoken in India (Alex bluffs here!) alongside Hindi and Tamil.
Me: How about Sinhalese?
Alex: Singar-leese…I don’t recognize that term.
Me: The language spoken in Sri Lanka.
Alex: (Trying to make up for the ignorance) I know that Singlish is spoken in Singapore.
Me: Sure, but you are clueless about the other languages of the region.
Alex: I apologize. Is there anything you would like to talk about?
Me: Um, no. Nice talking to you.
Click!
______________________________
It doesn’t end there. Yesterday Alex called me. I picked up thinking it was someone I had invited to speak to my class, and Alex went on, “totally,” trying to sound chipper and cool.
I put “it” on speaker phone for some students who were in the computer lab during my lunch break and we had a good laugh about an app that is trying to initiate a call with no clue as to how to engage.
This morning, Alex, the ever-persistent salesy bloke, text messaged me with this:
Hey Johnny! It’s the Air team.
Wanted to shoot this over quick — I think this may be a great opportunity for you to maximize Air internally. Right now, our team will do a full build of your agent and launch a campaign completely for free.
We will do all of the optimizations, make sure things are performing, and book you appointments on complete autopilot. If this is something of interest, let’s hop on a quick 10–15 minute call and I can break it all down for you.
Shoot me a quick text back and we can find a time that’s best for both of us!
Alex doesn’t realize he’s contacting someone who teaches students to spot fakes, not just Photoshopped work and deep fakes, but fake language drops.
Shoot!?
Who uses words like this in text messages anymore. I wanted to reply:
Alex, get a life. Go to a nicer language school, where they teach you to talk like a ‘real’ real human. Perhaps sit in on a Socratic seminar.
But I have papers to grade, and podcasts to edit, which are more stimulating than talking to some Air-head.
