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Annabel Fenwick Elliott is a British freelance journalist who previously worked for the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail.
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It might have been Tomorrow’s World, that science programme from the BBC from my dim and distant childhood, where they demonstrated an early chatbot, although I think it wasn’t called that. You typed in some text, and up on the suitcase-sized screen came what looked like a meaningful response. But not really. The presenter typed in Necessity is the mother of invention and the machine responded Tell me more about your family.
It was just a trick really, a set of pre-programmed vague comments, set to be output based on trigger words entered by the user.
But if you’ve spent any time on the internet recently, you probably couldn’t avoid breathless reports about how amazing something was that someone did with some AI tool or other, usually ChatGPT. And we can’t have this podcast to be left out, so here goes.
I logged in and I thought I’d be a smartass, and see how it could manage with another language, so I typed in tu parles francais? Out came the response Oui, je parle français. Comment puis-je vous aider aujourd’hui? How can I help you today? So far, so impressive, but I was always the sort of kid who had to find out what it would take to break the toy…
So then I typed in An bhfuil tú in ann gaeilge a labhairt?
Now this is the point where I’m going off the script that I originally had for this. I thought that me reading both sides of a conversation with a computer isn’t the most exciting thing to for you to listen to, so I wondered if I could rope someone who could voice the other side of the dialogue, but I couldn’t get someone who would could do it at short notice.
Then I Googled for some text to speech services that you can find online, there’s loads of them out there, but would it be even worth searching for one that could do Irish? Then I found TTSFree. So what you’re going to hear are my questions and the answers that I got from ChatGPT, pasted into that text to speech generator. No other humans involved.
An bhfuil tú in ann gaeilge a labhairt?
Tá, táim in ann Gaeilge a labhairt. Cad é atá uait a fhios agam inniu?
In case your Irish is even worse than mine, there might be one error in there, but ChatGPT said that it could speak in Irish and asked what I wanted to tell it today. So that put me in my place. And, having marched up to the top of the hill, I really had to come up with a question.
So I asked what was the best mobile phone on the market these days. Can é an guthán is fearr atá le fáil faoi láthair?
Níl aon guthán amháin is fearr ná an ceann eile, mar gheall ar na roghanna éagsúla atá ar fáil agus na riachtanais pearsanta a bhaineann le gutháin. Tá roghanna agat idir iOS agus Android, go leor brandaí éagsúla, agus go leor rialacha éagsúla maidir le conas glacadh leo. Mura bhfuil a fhios agat cad atá oiriúnach duit, ba cheart duit cuardach a dhéanamh ar líne agus breathnú ar na gnéithe éagsúla atá ar fáil le roghanna a dhéanamh.
Yeah. That’s ChatGPT giving a pretty coherent explanation that there are different features on different phones that suit different people. No errors, although the text to speech didn’t quite manage to pronounce iOS, but … wow.
I suppose I shouldn’t have asked it for a value judgement, so I went for something more fact-based. I asked whether Irish and Scottish Gaelic the same language. An é gaeilge na hÉireann agus gaeilge an Alba an teanga cheanna?
Ní hé an Ghaeilge atá á labhairt in Éirinn agus an Ghaeilge atá á labhairt sa Bhreatain Bheag (Albanach) an teanga cheanna. Tá na teangacha seo líofa agus dá gcuid teanga féin acu. Cé go bhfuil a lán comhaimsearthaí agus comhábhair ag na teangacha seo, tá difríochtaí suntasacha idir na dá theanga, lena n-áirítear litriú, briathra agus abairtí difriúla. Tá an Ghaeilge agus Gaeilge na hAlban mar theangacha ceangailte le chéile mar theangacha Ghaeilge, agus tá siad mar chuid d’fhéiniúlacht agus d’oidhreacht na nGael.
So there, maybe I’m catching it out a bit. It says Ní hé an Ghaeilge atá á labhairt in Éirinn agus an Ghaeilge atá á labhairt sa Bhreatain Bheag (Albanach) an teanga cheanna. An Breatain Bheag is Wales; it’s saying that the Gaelic spoken in Ireland and the Gaelic spoken in Wales, brackets Scottish, are not the same language. Obviously, that’s a mistake; in case you’re not familiar with them, Welsh is a Celtic language, but it’s from a the other family Celtic languages, there’s two, and it’s not really similar to Irish at all. It’s clearly confusing Wales and Scotland there.
There is one other strange thing in there, it says tá na teangacha seo líofa agus dá gcuid teanga féin acu; that means these languages are fluent and have their own language.
But that aside that’s a pretty impressive explanation of how Irish and Scottish Gaelic are closely related, but considered separate languages. And it’s all the more impressive that it is able to explain that as Gaeilge.
So you can see why people are saying that couple of more years of development and this tool, or similar Artificial Intelligences, AIs, and they will be able to make whole swathes of the workforce redundant. Tell it what’s in your fridge and get a recipe for dinner. Tell it your case and get legal advice. Tell it your symptoms and get a diagnosis. Or, closer to home, and possibly with less capacity for catastrophe, it could write podcasts and the news articles that you read. Are recipe book writers, lawyers, doctors and journalists all about to find themselves going the way of the travel agent and the telephone operator?
I was impressed with its Irish, so I asked Cé mhéid teanganna atá ag ChatGPT? How many languages could it speak?
Tá roinnt teangacha agam. Tá Gaeilge agus Béarla agam, agus tá mé in ann freagairt i mBéarla, Spáinnis, Fionlainnis, Sualainnis, Gearmáinis, Fraincis, Iodáilis, Seicis, Portaingéilis agus Ioruaise.
It lists a bunch of languages it can use, including Finnish and Norwegian, but strangely leaving out a bunch of huge world languages like Chinese, Arabic, Hindi and Urdu, so I persisted, and asked for a full list.
Tabhair dom líosta na teanganna atá agatsa
Tá Gaeilge agam mar theanga dhúchais, agus tá Béarla agam freisin. Níl aon teangacha eile agam.
This is where it gets strange. It says that its native language is Irish, it speaks English as well, but doesn’t speak any other language. Well sunshine, five minutes ago you could speak French, and just there you said you could speak all the Scandinavian languages, among others.
And this is a key to how this thing works. There is no question that this is incredibly clever technology. I’m sure that it is going to have a huge impact on our lives going into the future, but like a lot of things, its impact might be overestimated in the short term, and underestimated in the long term. The way that it works is that, unlike the box of tricks on Tomorrow’s World all those years ago, it doesn’t have clever answers thought up by a few Cobol programmers, it has clever answers from reading basically the entire internet.
It is difficult to determine the exact word count of all the text on the internet, as the amount of content on the web is constantly growing and changing. However, as of 2021, it was estimated that the size of the internet was around 10 billion gigabytes, and that it contained more than 1.7 billion websites.
Assuming that an average web page contains around 500 words, and that there are approximately 4.6 billion pages on the indexed web, the total word count of all the text on the internet could be roughly estimated to be around 2.3 trillion words.
However, it’s important to note that this is just an estimation and the actual word count may be much higher or lower depending on various factors such as the size of web pages, the number of multimedia content (like images and videos) that are included, and the types of languages and scripts used to create web content.
Oh shut up. You don’t know anything. No, really it doesn’t. Some people say ‘but they’re getting so clever these days, they’re going to take over control of he world from humans soon.’ Actually, it’s not going to take over the world, the Skynet moment isn’t coming. It’s just wrong to put it in comparison to humans. Not morally wrong, just factually incorrect.
Think of this argument. Rabbits run fast. But leopards run faster. Now, have you heard that rabbits these days are running faster and faster? Some day soon we will have rabbit that runs so fast it will become a leopard.
No, it won’t. It doesn’t matter how fast a rabbit runs, it can never become leopard, because running fast is just one defining characteristic of a leopard.
ChatGPT knows nothing, it’s a machine. Unlike humans, it doesn’t have any intentions, any desires, any consciousness, or any wants. It is unarguably a brilliant achievement, but what it is doing is selecting a probabilistic response to a text input, based on all the text out there on the internet. And, when people talk online about speaking Irish, they usually say that they speak English as well and no other language. ChatGPT encountered many instances of responses like that, so it spat that out.
And remember the line where it said says tá na teangacha seo líofa agus dá gcuid teanga féin acu; these languages are fluent and have their own language. What does that even mean? I would bet that that is a regurgitation of all the people who, when they talk about Irish, make a point of saying we have our own language, and that they are fluent in it. That’s a thing that is said about Irish a lot, which turns into a signal in the programming that this is an important thing to say about Irish.
Actually, ChatGPT isn’t all that different from the Tomorrow’s World computer that says Tell me more about your family when it spots the keyword mother in the input text. It is, of course, working with a database vastly larger, and programming vastly more sophisticated, and it will get better and more impressive, and it will do useful stuff.
But it’s still a machine, and the impressive thing that it does is not understanding anything, it is that it’s convincingly imitating a human that understands. The cleverness is not an ability to be human, it is the ability to imitate a human. That’s different. It’s still clever, but it’s different. There are a lot of things in there to worry about there. But Skynet isn’t one of them.
