Could a chatbot write my restaurant reviews? | Jay Rayner
One afternoon, an email arrives that threatens to end my career. Or at least it makes me seriously think about what the end of my career might look like. It comes from a woman from Ely called Camden Woollven who is interested in my restaurant reviews, a taste for the absurd and maybe just a little too much free time. Woollven works in the technology sector and has long been fascinated by OpenAI, a company founded in 2015, with investments from, among others, Elon Musk, to develop user-friendly applications involving artificial intelligence.
< p class="dcr-n6w1lc ">In November last year, after a $10 billion investment from Microsoft, OpenAI released ChatGPT3, a tool that was trained on a huge range of data and allows us to command articles and have human-like text conversations with a chatbot. It is currently free to use and thus registered 1 million users in the first week. Within two months, it had 100 million users, making it the fastest growing web application in Internet history. People all over the world were tricking ChatGPT — the initials stand for Generative Pre-trained Transformer — into writing essays for them, or computer coding, or even composing lyrics in the style of their favorite songwriter. If it involved words, they asked ChatGPT to do it. And then gasping at the speed and fluidity of what came back, while quoting lines from the Terminator movies about the apocalyptic rise of the machines.Woollven, meanwhile, had another of OpenAI's apps, called Playground, write negative reviews of lousy Chinese buffet restaurants in Skegness in the style of, well, me. I have never seen anywhere in Skegness again, let alone a Chinese buffet. She described it, apologetically, as her "new favorite hobby". In one, a fake me said I hadn't "seen such a depressing display of Asian fusion cuisine since I was caught in a monsoon in the Himalayas." Something a little weird to write, that. What is the connection between bad food and monsoons? But okay. Another, however, gave me pause. “The dining room was a dimly lit faux-oriental lair of off-pink walls and glittering papier-mâché dragons; the air was laden with a miasma of MSG and regret. Oh my God. This thing of using an emotion to describe a place? It was really a line that I could have written. Granted, not one of my best, but me nonetheless.
Like print journalists everywhere, I shuddered. One afternoon, during a break from asking waiters to write disturbing parodies of me, Woollven gave me a tutorial. The technology had been around for a few years, she said. This was the third iteration of ChatGPT. The second, released in 2019, was trained on 17 billion data points. "This version has been trained 10 times and is the largest AI language model to date," she said. It had been fed by truckloads of text from all over the web, which means it can use probability to figure out what the next word should be. It's predictive text, but about performance-enhancing drugs measured in terabytes. This month, OpenAI announced the release of a new iteration, ChatGPT4.
ChatGPT3 has, Woollven said, "been fine-tuned specifically for its conversational capability. Oh, and it's pretty censored. It won't write porn for you, for example. That's understandable. In March 2016, Microsoft launched an AI bot called Tay that was intended to learn conversational ability through interactions with real people. Within 24 hours on Twitter, Tay had responded to other tweeters by seemingly becoming a genocidal Nazi, tweeting his admiration for Hitler. He was quickly taken offline.
Playground, Woollven said, was a little freer than ChatGPT. One afternoon I tried it. It was a reassuring exercise. I asked OpenAI's Playground to write a negative review of the Five , a Parisian three-star Michelin, in my style. My actual review in 2017 had caused an international incident. This one will not have t raised a single Parisian eyebrow. “The presentation was lackluster and the portions tiny,” he said. "The servers were the worst part of the experience."
So far so monotonous. I then asked him to write a description of the naked fireside wrestling scene from the 1969 film Women in Love, replacing Oliver Reed and Alan Bates with myself and Gordon Ramsay. What can I say ? I was restless. He rose to this challenge admirably. "Crackling firelight flickered over the sweaty limbs of restaurant critic Jay Rayner and chef Gordon Ramsay as they struggled...
One afternoon, an email arrives that threatens to end my career. Or at least it makes me seriously think about what the end of my career might look like. It comes from a woman from Ely called Camden Woollven who is interested in my restaurant reviews, a taste for the absurd and maybe just a little too much free time. Woollven works in the technology sector and has long been fascinated by OpenAI, a company founded in 2015, with investments from, among others, Elon Musk, to develop user-friendly applications involving artificial intelligence.
< p class="dcr-n6w1lc ">In November last year, after a $10 billion investment from Microsoft, OpenAI released ChatGPT3, a tool that was trained on a huge range of data and allows us to command articles and have human-like text conversations with a chatbot. It is currently free to use and thus registered 1 million users in the first week. Within two months, it had 100 million users, making it the fastest growing web application in Internet history. People all over the world were tricking ChatGPT — the initials stand for Generative Pre-trained Transformer — into writing essays for them, or computer coding, or even composing lyrics in the style of their favorite songwriter. If it involved words, they asked ChatGPT to do it. And then gasping at the speed and fluidity of what came back, while quoting lines from the Terminator movies about the apocalyptic rise of the machines.Woollven, meanwhile, had another of OpenAI's apps, called Playground, write negative reviews of lousy Chinese buffet restaurants in Skegness in the style of, well, me. I have never seen anywhere in Skegness again, let alone a Chinese buffet. She described it, apologetically, as her "new favorite hobby". In one, a fake me said I hadn't "seen such a depressing display of Asian fusion cuisine since I was caught in a monsoon in the Himalayas." Something a little weird to write, that. What is the connection between bad food and monsoons? But okay. Another, however, gave me pause. “The dining room was a dimly lit faux-oriental lair of off-pink walls and glittering papier-mâché dragons; the air was laden with a miasma of MSG and regret. Oh my God. This thing of using an emotion to describe a place? It was really a line that I could have written. Granted, not one of my best, but me nonetheless.
Like print journalists everywhere, I shuddered. One afternoon, during a break from asking waiters to write disturbing parodies of me, Woollven gave me a tutorial. The technology had been around for a few years, she said. This was the third iteration of ChatGPT. The second, released in 2019, was trained on 17 billion data points. "This version has been trained 10 times and is the largest AI language model to date," she said. It had been fed by truckloads of text from all over the web, which means it can use probability to figure out what the next word should be. It's predictive text, but about performance-enhancing drugs measured in terabytes. This month, OpenAI announced the release of a new iteration, ChatGPT4.
ChatGPT3 has, Woollven said, "been fine-tuned specifically for its conversational capability. Oh, and it's pretty censored. It won't write porn for you, for example. That's understandable. In March 2016, Microsoft launched an AI bot called Tay that was intended to learn conversational ability through interactions with real people. Within 24 hours on Twitter, Tay had responded to other tweeters by seemingly becoming a genocidal Nazi, tweeting his admiration for Hitler. He was quickly taken offline.
Playground, Woollven said, was a little freer than ChatGPT. One afternoon I tried it. It was a reassuring exercise. I asked OpenAI's Playground to write a negative review of the Five , a Parisian three-star Michelin, in my style. My actual review in 2017 had caused an international incident. This one will not have t raised a single Parisian eyebrow. “The presentation was lackluster and the portions tiny,” he said. "The servers were the worst part of the experience."
So far so monotonous. I then asked him to write a description of the naked fireside wrestling scene from the 1969 film Women in Love, replacing Oliver Reed and Alan Bates with myself and Gordon Ramsay. What can I say ? I was restless. He rose to this challenge admirably. "Crackling firelight flickered over the sweaty limbs of restaurant critic Jay Rayner and chef Gordon Ramsay as they struggled...
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