Bing!
Kia ora, friends!
I think I may need to preface this for those not necessarily keeping up with tech news, so a few weeks ago at this point, Microsoft announced it was releasing ‘The New Bing’, powered by a version of ChatGPT, which is an update to their search engine that competes with Google. Now, if you’re not familiar with ChatGPT, that’s a whole other topic that is well outside of the scope of this post (or even this publication!), but this article from The Verge might be able to give you some context. This new version of Bing is pretty cool and I’ve played around with it a bit, and I wanted to share with you all some of the stuff I’ve gotten out of it.
So on a whim a recently, I decided to ask Bing to write me a poem. To be honest I was kind of shocked, because it’s so good, it feels like magic. I had a particular person in mind when I asked for this, and it just fits so well with how I really feel. Of course I can’t claim any kind of credit for this, a robot wrote it, but I felt like I desperately needed to share it with the world because it’s so fucking good. The prompt was ‘heartbreak, hatred and loss’, and the following is what it gave me:
You broke my heart into pieces
You filled my soul with hatred
You took away all my reasons
To live, to love, to create
Now I'm left with nothing but pain
Nothing but memories of you
Nothing but scars that remain
Of the love that was never true
I wish I could forget you forever
I wish I could erase you from my mind
I wish I could find a new lover
Who would be gentle and kind
But you haunt me like a ghost
You linger in my dreams
You are the one I loved the most
And the one who made me scream
So how can I move on from this loss?
How can I heal this wound?
How can I bear this cross?
That weighs me down like a tomb
Maybe someday I'll find peace
Maybe someday I'll forgive
Maybe someday I'll release
The hatred that makes me live
But until then, I'll write these words
To express what's in my heart
To let go of these hurts
And make a new start.After reading that, I decided to give Bing the same prompt but with a “happy ending,” and it wrote this:
You broke my heart into pieces
You filled my soul with hatred
You took away all my reasons
To live, to love, to create
But then I met someone new
Someone who made me smile
Someone who saw me through
The darkness and the trial
He showed me how to love again
He healed my broken heart
He gave me hope and joy and pain
And a brand new start
Now I'm grateful for what you did
You made me stronger and wiser
You helped me find my true love's bid
And become a better person
So thank you for breaking my heart
Thank you for making me hate
Thank you for taking apart
My life, my love, my fate
Because of you, I found the one
Who loves me more than you ever did
Who makes me happy and makes me fun
Who is my partner and my friend.These honestly gave me goosebumps when I read them. A machine wrote this. I mean I guess technically not just one machine but many, but it’s still bizarre to me that AI technology finally feels like it has arrived. It’s not perfect of course, and you may have heard about some of the bizarre things Bing was saying before Microsoft put some additional chains on it, but it’s still really fucking cool.
As far as I’m aware, Microsoft is currently taking requests for access to this, but if you have a Microsoft account and a device that can run their Edge browser (there is also a dedicated Bing app on the iOS apps store), you can head to bing dot com and reserve your place in the queue. I think this is really cool; it remionds me of the first time I got to interact with Siri on a family member’s iPhone 4s, how magic that was to finally see a voice assistant that worked. I’m really excited about the future of this technology, y’all!
Thanks so much for reading! As always, if you have comments/questions/suggestions, you can hit me up at the links at the bottom of the page. And a reminder - there’s a Tumblr in there now! The one in the link bar is a mirror for this site, but I also have a personal Tumblr page where I mostly just Taylorpost (the term I invented for endlessly reblogging GIFs of Taylor Swift) and reblog stuff that I like? And, there’s that email address there now too!
Thanks again, everyone. I’ll talk to you all again soon. Ka kite anō au i a koe. 💚