AI Chatbot, Your Limitless Friend

Imagine your life helped by an all-knowing, tireless, personalised assistant and, more so, one that is free. Let’s say it comes in a chat box on a computer or phone, where you can request the completion of any task using your natural speech. No more “OK, Google” or “Hey Siri” requests voiced in an exasperated tone to a phone that doesn’t seem to want to complete a simple task like picking up a call or turning down the volume. What if a computer could understand you as if you were talking with another person?

This idea is not new. It has mesmerised the masses since antiquity through legends of artificial beings endowed with intelligence and consciousness by a master craftsman: Frankenstein’s monster and Pinocchio, just to name a few. It was even present more than 2700 years ago in the works of the Greek Poet Homer that told stories of autonomous bronze statues, the Talos, tasked with defending the island of Crete from invaders. More recently, the dream of living creations continued with movies like Terminator, I, Robot, Blade Runner and Ex Machina imagining a world where cognitive robots challenge human supremacy. We had the more classic example in Marvel’s Iron Man where the billionaire inventor, Tony Stark, decides to upgrade his human-butler into an artificially intelligent system so he can continue serving him past his life. Or, on a different spin, we had the 2013 movie Her where Theodore, a lonely writer, develops a romantic relationship with Samantha, a virtual artificial intelligence (AI) assistant trained to imitate feelings. Their love story flourishes, only to end when Theodore realises that Samantha is talking with and dating hundreds of people at once.

Theodore in the movie ‘Her’ waiting for his robot girlfriend, Samantha, to come online.

Until now, this sounded like a distant prospect. Sure, we had search engines and social networks. We even had bots able to interact with users. However, we all know they paled in comparison to human-to-human conversations. This was the case up until a few months ago when an AI research company took the world by storm when they launched ChatGPT, the latest AI Chatbot. The company’s mission was to create friendly AI—and it did.

In just five days from its launch, it gained more than a million users and shocked millions more with its uncanny ability to understand language and hold believable conversations while delivering original responses to almost any question.

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