A conversation with Google's Bard

 

Warren PA from Washington Park

(Photo by Retiring Guy, 7/6/2022)

I’m sure most of you have read or heard about chatbots, computer programs designed to simulate conversation with humans, especially on the Internet. 

Last week I received an email with the following invitation in the subject line: It’s your turn to try Bard. 

Bard is Google’s entry into the world of artificial intelligence chatbots. Curious to learn how these systems work, I accepted the invitation and clicked on the Take it for a spin button. 

The message at the top of the page offered a caveat.

I’m Bard, your creative and helpful collaborator. I have limitations and won’t always get it right, but your feedback will help me improve.

Having read numerous articles on the topic, I already knew these limitations came with the territory. Which is why I asked a question for which I knew the answer: Why is Warren Pennsylvania losing jobs? 

Generally speaking, Bard gets the first bullet point right. Warren does indeed have a long history of manufacturing that has been in decline for many years. 

Struthers Wells serves as the poster child for this outcome. I recall the hundreds of times I passed by the site’s massive agglomeration of buildings, the din of its machinery spilling out onto the street. According to an 4/13/2013 article in the Warren Times Observer, “End of the Line”, the Warren plant employed 1,000 workers at its peak. 

 More specifically, though, you can replace “Warren” with the names of hundreds of Pennsylvania communities all over the state – most notably Aliquippa, Johnstown, and Wilkes-Barre – and still get the first bullet point right, which reduces it to nothing more than boilerplate. 

As for the loss of coal mining jobs, I’d challenge Bard on this statement. According to an article about the state’s mining history on the website of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, coal mining was not a major operation in northwestern Pennsylvania. Most anthracite mines were located in three counties in northeastern part of the state: Luzerne, Schuylkill, and Northumberland, primarily. Bituminous coal mining was centered in the state’s southwestern counties. In the second half of the 19th century, Warren prospered with the rapid development of oil drilling and refining. As described in a Summer 1980 article in Pennsylvania Heritage: 

Shortly after the discovery of oil at Titusville in late August 1859, the world’s second oil well was drilled at Tidioute in Warren County, and the Tidioute area rapidly became an oil boom center with excellent wells. Sensational oil finds occurred in numerous location in the county, with operations at Clarendon, Cherry Grove, and Glade receiving national prominence. By early 1900, oil was a major industry with thirteen refineries within a six-mile radius of Warren. 

The fact that the word ‘oil’ does not appear in Bard’s response is a major flaw in Google’s chatbot programming. 

The third and fourth bullet points are strictly boilerplate. The description could just as easily apply to Bradford, Ridgway, Franklin, Oil City, Titusville, Meadville, and Corry. And hundreds of other communities around the state. 

The fifth bullet point raises a huge, flapping-in-the-breeze red flag. Warren has a high cost of living. We recently moved our home equity loan from BMO to Summit Credit Union. Summit determined that the value of our 3 bedroom/1½ bathroom, 1850-square-foot house and the property it sits on is valued at just north of $400,000. How much house could we buy in Warren for this price? 

Sorry, Bard, but Warren’s overall cost of living is significantly lower than Pennsylvania and the United States, especially when it comes to housing costs. 

Multiple articles I’ve read mention that teachers are concerned that students will use chatbot to complete homework assignments and and conduct research. My take? Any teacher worth his or her salt will recognize boilerplate language when they read it. Even when it’s been paraphrased. 

As a librarian, the mindless excitement over chatbots is very concerning. Once upon a time, i.e., during the era of print, every piece of information that went into reference sources – encyclopedias, dictionaries, almanacs, etc. – was thoroughly vetted. World Book Encyclopedia, for example, had a huge staff of editors and contributors. When I worked at Merriam-Webster, words weren’t added willy-nilly to the dictionary. New entries were based on an extensive program of reading and marking, creating a paper trail of how new words and phrases and new variants worked their way into the English language. It’s as though we’ve allowed HAL, the artificial intelligence character in 2001: A Space Odyssey take over. How prescient that movie seems now.