Area 51
S3E8: The truth is out there... isn't it?
“I’ve got a few boxes to drop off at the lab. Can I just pop through?”
This week we head to Area 51 in 1988 in search of ‘the truth’ and to see how ChatGPT deals with conspiracy theories (in this case ones about aliens and the US government).
Comedian Sunil Patel returns to PastMaster, bringing his curiosity about ‘other life’ to the fore, and taking on the voice of GameMaster for this episode.
Will Tan even make it inside Area 51 safely? Will his disguise fool anyone? And will he discover proof of alien life on Earth?
Tune in on Monday 24 June to find out.
AI in the news
Meet Geoff, our new head of comms
Higher paid workers will find their jobs affected by AI while lower paid workers will just truck on as normal.
This is according to a study in Science journal which predicts that the likes of blockchain engineers, clinical data managers, public relations specialists and financial quantitative analysts will all be significantly affected by AI while motorcycle mechanics, pile driver operators and stonemasons won’t be.
“Exposure [to AI] can be good for workers, or it can be bad for workers,” is the reassuringly vague summary from Daniel Rock, a co-author of the paper.
Interesting that the study finds PR specialists will have their work done by AI. Based on the evidence I’ve seen, I wouldn’t allow ChatGPT within 100 miles of a customer-facing role in my company.
Fetch the Smelling Salts
(L-R) Keon, Tan, Kim, Alice
As promised a few weeks back, Tan and Keon have ventured onto the excellent Fetch the Smelling Salts podcast to discuss the movie Gladiator with hosts Alice and Kim.
Head over for a listen and to learn some great gladiator facts. For example did you know:
Gladiators were paid for product placements
Emperor Commodus was far madder and more depraved than shown in the film
Mel Gibson was originally the first choice actor to play Maximus (can you imagine?)
AI bots vs conspiracy theories
Experimenting with alien technology: not advised
The premise for next week’s PastMaster is to test how much AI generative text programmes like ChatGPT believe the nonsense they read online.
Given the way they work – essentially predicting what words are most likely to follow a prompt based on the information they have consumed online – you would imagine they would hoover up the junk online about aliens, assassination theories and faked moon landings.
But based on this week’s experiment my judgement is that GPT is not quite as mad as you might expect. The truth is sometimes mundane.
Until next time, Tan & the PastMaster crew
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