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Apparently, I Now Sound Like An AI (And What It Means)

The other day, I used OpenAI’s new Whisper algorithm for the first time



Only to realize something very, very strange.

If you’ve not heard about Whisper, it’s OpenAI’s automatic speech recognition (ASR) system, and it’s significantly more accurate compared to something like Siri, which I usually use, or other kinds of technologies.

Anyway, for an upcoming Medium piece, I chose to narrate everything into the voice memo app on my iPhone, in preparation to have it transcribed by Whisper, while I was on a drive from my home to my cello lesson about 15 minutes away.

Whisper did it *almost* perfectly!

Whisper did it (almost!) perfectly, by the way.

Then, I uploaded this into ChatGPT just to format it but didn’t change any of the text.

This was perfect! It was well transcribed, everything looked good, and all that remained was for me to just post the thing, right?


No.

Because you see, at this point, I started to wonder about a strange question that was starting to brew in my mind:

Was this text AI generated or was it human generated?

I asked several people this question, and almost all of them, said the same thing – it was AI assisted, but the text itself was primarily generated by a human.

To me, that makes a lot of sense because I recited it from my voice, and it wouldn’t make sense if it were considered to be AI generated unless what’s inside my head is not in fact a human brain, but rather some sort of super computer.

So I decided to just check with GPTZero just to be sure.

Here’s what GPTZero had to say, as it casually marked the parts of the my essay that it thought were AI-generated in a bright yellow.

I was a little shook.

Essentially, the majority of the text was determined to have been generated by AI.

At first, I thought about a couple of different possibilities. I wonder to myself – was it because I had put the text through ChatGPT? Could it have been that the text had been watermarked or modified in some way that allowed GPTZero to determine that it had been generated by AI?

That didn’t seem to make sense, particularly since OpenAI has not yet implemented watermarks in text . Still, the text definitely wasn’t modified in any way apart from the paragraphing or anything else of that nature.

Therefore, what was the only logical possibility here?

The only possibility is that according to GPTZero, I sounded like an AI.

This made me think quite a fair bit and it just so happened that in the gym I ran into my friend Sandy Clarke, with whom I ended up discussing the matter, (Sandy is wonderful and incredibly humble relative to what he’s achieved – check him out here!) and who suggested that perhaps artificial intelligence speech is just speech of a formal nature and to consider the speeches of JFK and Obama, so I decided to go right ahead and input JFK’s inaugural speech into GPTZero:


Then I went on to input Obama’s inaugural speech:


 So did this mean that John F Kennedy and Obama were both advanced forms of artificial intelligence sent to planet earth to rule over the most advanced societies in the world, over which no normal human could have presided?

It would be funny if that were true.

At this point, I started to realize that the way that I spoke was just similar to the way that these people speak, which was similar to what GPTZero was identifying as AI-generated.

That’s not all that surprising, since my job is to help students learn how to write effectively, to assist them with their grammar, and also with the way that they use the English language.

But it made me start to wonder – when we interact with artificial intelligence, it’s a new type of interaction where we’re essentially just conversing with and reading from a tool that we are constantly interacting with all the time. Is it all that surprising that that could lead to language change on our parts, and therefore a shift in the way that we think and communicate?

It’s not necessarily going to be the case that humans end up fusing with machine parts, as some movies seem to suggest that we will, but certainly there are going to be changes in our culture as a result of the way that we interact with technology that perhaps aren’t immediately apparent at the outset; what are those changes going to be? It’s not immediately clear what the answer to those questions are.

It was definitely funny to think about this, though, because it leads them into all sorts of interesting questions about sentience, and also about the people that we communicate with – what if the people around us end up adopting artificial intelligence language patterns to the point that we are unable to distinguish the language that is used by artificial intelligence from the language that is used by human beings?

That might be one of the ways in which we become more machinelike as a species, or perhaps not — either way, it was pretty interesting to watch this happen and to ask myself about the ways in which I am being influenced by AI, because we often think of humans and AI as being distinct and different from one another, and that there are clear boundary lines that separate us


But how are those boundary lines changing over time? The answer to that question is unclear to me.

Yep.

As we interact with AI, I suppose that we will start to talk a little bit more like AI.

As we move forward in this world, I expect that AI detectors will not really be a meaningful way in which we detect human beings — that our natural instincts of judgment and distinction may become just a little bit finer as we go through life.

On my part, I find it kind of funny that maybe the people reading this piece might think rightfully that I am an AI — a sentient AI, maybe — but an AI for all intents and purposes.

To that I say
 Who knows if that could happen to you too?

ChatGPT Explodes In Malaysia

ChatGPT’s been around for a while, but as I’ve noted, my home country of Malaysia has been a bit slow in dealing with the hype it’s generated…

But that may have changed.

A while ago, I joined ChatGPT Malaysia.

Today, it exploded and hit 1k, and it shows no sign of stopping; the hype is real!!

Why?

A mixture of Manglish, an anonymous dude who prompted OpenAI’s ChatGPT with the legendary Manglish prompt, the combined efforts of Kenneth Yu Kern San and Jornes Sim, and, I guess, a huge, huge dose of the wonders of ChatGPT x)

My own small contribution (lol!)

I guess I’ve evolved into the comments guy – take a look here if you want 🙂

Ah, what can I say?

It’s truly fascinating to be at the beginning stage of a revolution.

First off, congrats and creds to Pang for being infinitely better than I am at managing communities at the moment – something I’m definitely looking forward to learning more in the days ahead!!

Second off, I care a lot about the deeper significance of things – and I’m incredibly glad that this is one of the many things that’s starting off AI on the right foot in Malaysia, my home country – where this will go and what will happen I have no idea, but really look forward to watching what the world’s going to bring 🙂

Amongst other things, I guess it’s brought a ChatGPT Plus subscription for which now, in order to sign up, you’ve got to join a waitlist.

Can’t wait to see what’s next, and thank you based Sam Altman and OpenAI for creating this gift to humanity 😛

Till the next one!!!

P.S. Is it too ambik peluang if I tell you that I’m the creator of the “Transforming Your (Creative) Writing With ChatGPT” course on Udemy? 😛

Thanks and till next time!

A Strange War: AI v. AI Detectors

“Upload your essay into Turnitin by 11:59pm on Thursday night?
You meant start the essay at 11:57 then submit it at 11:58, am I right?” — Gigachad ChatGPT student.

We begin our discussion by discussing the sweet smell of plagiarism.

It wafts in the air as educators run around like headless chickens, looking here, looking there as they flip through oddly good essays with panicked expressions.

“Was this AI-generated, Bobby?!” says a hapless teacher, staring at a piece of paper that seems curiously bereft of grammatical errors, suspecting that Bobby could never have created something of this caliber.

“No teacher, I just became smart!” Bobby cries, running off into the sunset because he is sad, he is going to become a member of an emo boyband, and he doesn’t want to admit that he generated his homework with ChatGPT.

generated by Midjourney, if that wasn’t obvious

This smell casts fear and trepidation over every single part of our education system, for it threatens to break it; after all, education is special and it is meant to be sacrosanct — after all, is it not the very same system that is designed to teach humans facts and knowledge and above all, to communicate and collaborate to solve the problems of our era with intelligence, initiative, and drive?

It’s unsurprising that the world of education has flipped out over ChatGPT, because artificial intelligence opens up the very real possibility that schools may be unable to detect it.

Fun and games, right? It’s just a bunch of kids cheating on assignments with artificial intelligence? It’s not going to affect the older generation?

As it turns out, no — that’s not the case. I’ll explain why later.

But before that, let’s talk a bit about the part of our education system that AI is threatening: Essay-writing.

If students simply choose to let their work be completed by artificial intelligence and forget all else, that just means that they’ve forgone the education that they’re supposed to have received, thereby crippling them by an act of personal choice, right
?

But each of us has been a student, and if we have children, our children either will be or have been students too; there is a deep emotional connection that stretches across the entire world when it comes to this.

Therefore, when Princeton University CS student Edward Tian swooped in to offer a solution,it’s not all that surprising that the world flipped.

Enter GPTZero.

Humans deserve the truth. A noble statement and a very bold one for a plagiarism detector, but something that’s a little deeper than most of us would probably imagine.

But consider this.

Not everyone who uses AI text is cheating in the sense of doing something that they are not supposed to and thereby violating rules, therefore the word ‘plagiarism detector’ doesn’t quite or always apply here.

This algorithm, as with other algorithms that attempt to detect AI-generated text, is not just a plagiarism detector that merely serves to catch students in petty acts of cheating —it is an AI detector.

An AI Detector At Work.

So how does it work?

GPTZero assigns a likelihood that a particular text is generated by AI by using two measures:

Perplexity, and Burstiness.

Essentially, in more human language than that which was presented on GPTZero’s website, GPTZero says that


The less random the text (its ‘perplexity’), the more likely it was generated by an AI.

The less that randomness changes throughout time (its ‘burstiness’), the more likely that the text was generated by AI.

Anyway, GPTZero gives each text a score for perplexity and burstiness, and from there, outputs a probability that given sentences of a text were generated by AI, highlighting the relevant sentences, and easily displays the result to the user.

Alright, sounds great!

Does GPTZero deserve the hype, though?


Does this actually work?

Let’s try it with this pleasant and AI-generated text that is exactly about the importance of hype (lol).

That’s 100% AI-generated and we know that as fact.


Would we know if we didn’t see it in the ChatGPT terminal window, though?


Okay, let’s not think about that.

Down the hatch



And boom.

As we can see, GPTZero, humanity’s champion, managed to identify that the text that we had generated was written by AI.

Hurrah!!!

Or
?

I proceeded to rewrite the essay with another AI software.


After which GPTZero essentially declared:

So nope, GPTZero can’t detect rewritten texts that were generated with AI — which it should be able to if it truly is an *AI* detector in the best sense — and which in turn suggests that the way that it’s been operationalized has yet to allow it to be the bastion protecting humanity from the incursion of robots into our lives.

It’s not that GPTZero — or even OpenAI’s own AI Text Reviewer, amongst a whole panoply of different AI detectors – are bad or poorly operationalized, by any means. Rather, it’s that the operationalization is supremely difficult because the task is punishingly hard, and that we are unlikely to have a tool that can detect AI-generated text 100% unless we perform watermarking (MIT Technology Review) and we would have to use multiple algorithms to be able to detect text, or come up with alternate measures to do so.

An Arms Race between AI Large Language Models (LLMS) and AI Detectors — and why you should care (even if you’re not a student).

As I’ve mentioned, there is an arms race at hand between AI Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, and AI detectors like GPTZero, the consequence of which is likely that the two will compete with one another and each will make progress in its own way, progressing the direction of both technologies forward.

Personally, I think that AI detectors are fighting a losing battle against LLMs for many reasons, but let me not put the cart before the horse — it is a battle to watch, not to predict the outcome of before it’s even begun.

Implications of this strange war:

But why should you care about any of this if you’re not a student? It’s not like you’re going to be looking at essays constantly, right?

Let’s take aside the fact that you’re reading a blog post right now, and let’s also move away purely from the plagiarized essay bit that we’ve been thinking about, as we gravitate towards thinking about how ChatGPT is a language model.

It’s a good bet that you use language everywhere in your life, business, and relationships with other people in order to communicate, coordinate, and everything else.

When we go around on the Internet, it’s not always immediately evident what was AI generated, what was generated by a human or, for that matter, what was inspired by an AI and later followed through by a human.

The whole reason we need something like a plagiarism detector is that we may not even be sure that a particular piece of language (which we most often experience in the form of text) is AI-generated with our own eyes and minds, to the point that we need to literally rely upon statistical patterns in order to evaluate some thing that we are looking at directly in front of us, thereby recruiting our brains as we evaluate the entirety of an output.

The problem is


Language doesn’t just exist as text.

Language exists as text, yes, but also as speech. Moreover, speech and text are easily convertible to one another — and we know very well what ChatGPT is doing: Generating text.

We now know that there are Text To Speech (TTS) models that generate speech from text. They’re not necessarily all great, but that’s besides the point — it presages the translation from text into voice.

Think about it.

If the voices that are generated by AI become sufficiently realistic-sounding and their intonations (VALL-E, is that you?), how might you know that these voices aren’t real unless there are severe model safeguards that impede the models from functioning as they are supposed to?

Now combine that indistinguishable voice with sophisticated ChatGPT output that can evade any AI detector and in turn may, depending on the features that end up developing, evade your own capacity to tell whether you are even interacting with a human or not.

How would that play out in the metaverse?

How would that play out in the real world, over the phone?

How would you ever know whether anyone that you’re interacting with is real or not? Whether they are sentient?

The battle between AI and AI Detectors is not just a battle over the difference between an A grade and a C grade.

It’s a battle over a future where what’s at stake is identifying what even qualifies as human.

How AI Tech Will Disrupt Businesses (24th February)

Do you ever feel like you might have gotten yourself in something a little bigger than you’d imagined was possible?

Excited to announce that I’ll be speaking about AI for the “How AI Tech Will Disrupt Businesses” panel on the 24th of February! Thank you Vulcan Post for the feature and MrMoney TV x Entrepreneurs and Startups Malaysia for the invitation!

You’ll be able to meet me there directly and hear me talk about the ways AI is going to change businesses around the world alongside my fellow panelist, Richard Ker!

If you’ve not heard of Richard, the man is a legend at creating incredible infographics and marketing, and I respect both his trite observations and the value that he’s created for literally thousands of people throughout Malaysia and far beyond; the man is a true blue digital authority, If you’re looking for something specific, feel free to check out this article that he’s written on Facebook, amongst other things; the man is everywhere!

In other words, what does this mean?

It means I need to level up!

This conference is something that I’m truly honored to be a part of, and a wonderful opportunity to learn from many incredible minds that I won’t be missing by any stretch of the imagination.

As we speak, I’m preparing for with all my might at the moment even as I read and learn more about artificial intelligence, building up that reading habit again thoughtfully documented by my dear friend Sandy Clarke and that I’ll make sure to work towards in the days ahead as I build this platform.

Meanwhile, if you haven’t already, please feel free to join Artificial Intelligence Malaysia! I’ve had some pretty wild conversations in the past day or so, and it would be great to add a diversity of voices to the group especially if you’re really interested in AI and everything that it has to offer 🙂

In preparation for that, know that I’ve been reading extensively and creating lots of other content as well because I know that anything I have to make this worth your time, and will do my very best to do so.

Till we meet, then!

Thanks For Responding To My Shameless Self Promotion

I’ve been doing plenty of writing on different platforms over the past couple of days.

Honestly, when I say a lot of writing, I mean a lot of writing.

I’ve written on LowYat, Reddit, Medium, everywhere. At the pace I’m going, I guess I seem like an Energizer bunny at times, but also possibly seeming like I’m crazy because the way that I write is that I talk to Siri and get Siri to transcribe every single thing that I say.

“Hey Siri!”

Anyway, that seems to be the reason that a lot of people are coming in from different places here and there – Welcome one, welcome all! So glad that you decided to be here!

Noun I think normally marketing should be a boring thing, but for me it’s actually been quite entertaining, and still with seemingly fit for moments that I am sure I don’t appreciate the full scope of just yet.

Probably the most random one of these instances was the way that I met Pang Sern, the admin of ChatGPT Malaysia, a new Facebook group that I started posting in over the past day and in which people have started to ask me to repost my writings from this blog (o.o)

I have been going on that self-promotion grind, shameless author as I am, and found myself at a Star article about ChatGPT featuring some guy who has nothing to do with ChatGPT but whose face was somehow plastered on the article


Nice to meet you if you somehow end up seeing this, Yun-Han! LOL)


 To which Andrew Boey rejoins with the following epic comment:

To which, appreciating Andrew Boey’s epic comment, I rejoin with shameless self promotion ala here, only to realize that Pang also writes on Medium.


Which then leads to even more shameless self promotion



Which then leads us here:

Okay, that’s a bunch of people.

Well, what can I say? Thank you for responding to my shameless self-promotion (and to the moments where I wasn’t self-promoting either
 Were there any?!)
 and I hope that it wasn’t just self-promotion with no benefits to you, the reader, because that would cause the entire house of cards to come falling down!

But now, some self – evaluation!

On my part, I do know on an intuitive level why it is that self-promotion generally isn’t appreciated – it’s one of those things that interrupts the flow of community in the name of furthering a specific person’s aim, an attempt to distinguish oneself from a crowd for whatever reason – it is natural for people to look at that with scorn: Who is this person, and why are they creating a ruckus?

Sorry if you found it annoying and rest assured I understand why; on my part though, it was one of those things that I had to do no matter what because I know that I have something valuable to share and that there is a mission that I am on – for which I must do my thing.

I just happened to be lucky enough that people have responded kindly so far and seem to enjoy my work, so I’ll look forward to creating more of it!

I’m thrilled that you’re here and that you enjoyed my writing (or perhaps you hate it and wish to strangle me? I’ll never know if you don’t comment!), and I’ll look forward to creating much more for you in the days to come 🙂

Till our next chat! (Literally this entire piece was narrated out to Siri while I was sitting in my chair, LOL)

– V

Teaching people about Artificial Intelligence

Long day today for many reasons, but a fulfilling one altogether. I spent some time writing a Medium article about my feelings about clickbait, had Starbucks like a good proper hipster working in a cafe for a couple minutes as my mom was happily raving about NSK.

As I’m moving forward with the process of marketing my book, I guess that I’m starting to realize that there isn’t a lot of knowledge about artificial intelligence in Malaysia at the moment, and I think that I can play an important role in sharing more about that in days to come.

I’m not 100% sure how I’ll be developing that platform just yet, but I know for sure that this isn’t something that a lot of people know too much about, so if I can, I’d like to be able to share my knowledge in ways that can help people around me by taking the first steps forward on a journey where the steps aren’t always clear for me.

I guess a big part of it is sharing information and knowledge?

Well, everything has to start somewhere and frankly a small part of me has doubts about what I’m going to share in the first place and how it’s going to be received, but I know I have to be brave 🙂

If you’re interested in AI and you happen to be from Malaysia, consider joining Artificial Intelligence Malaysia 🙂

The Strange Value of Showing Up

I woke up in the morning with basically no energy from a long day yesterday, forced myself to run, and mysteriously ended up gaining more energy than I had expended before the run before proceeding to go to the gym while somehow forgetting to bring my gym card with me…

Only to have the nice girl who works near the front of the gym (who is also one of my ARC readers for The Little Robot That Could Paint – thank you Christina!!!!) let me in so I could add another day to my ongoing workout streak of… What was it?

Yeah, it’s 1502 days straight that I’ve gone to the gym straight (or exercised) without losing my streak.

a fitness influencer I am not

Uh, a fitness influencer I am not, but if I don’t go to the gym, it just feels… Wrong?

Incidentally, I hope you don’t think this means that I’m some hyper-disciplined machine thing, because that couldn’t be further from the truth.

I’ve failed at a ton of things, but somehow, this is one of those things that’s stayed long enough that it’s become a habit – by no means is it or has it ever been the case that I’ve just been hanging out, doing my thing, keeping at perfection no matter the circumstance; no way freaking Jose, that has NOT been me.

I failed at consistently posting on YouTube (I am monetized, though!) albeit partly because there’s not enough content about ergonomic chairs to make (lol wait till you discover my second persona), failed at writing consistently in the past, failed at X, Y, Z, W, a, b, c, you name it! Some of these things are things that I’d definitely like to come back to (like YouTube), while others are things that I think I’ll be leaving behind for now…

But none of that changes the fact that I maintain a very healthy respect for showing up consistently.

Showing up helps you build a compounding effect, yes, and it would be clichĂ©d if I were just to mention that that’s all it does; I’ll speak about that a little bit more in context of the thing I can actually say that I kept with for now.

Showing up has taught me that yes, showing up does help a TON in bringing you to where you want to go (mainly because I realized that working out and exercising is something that you absolutely have to make into an equilibrium if you truly want sustainable results), but it’s equally taught me that if you try to get to where you want to go without a sense of intention and merely abide by the idea that things can be automated away, you’re going to get nowhere and will just get swept in the wind.

For example, while I was working up somewhere during days 1350 and 1420, I remember that I was gaining a ton of weight – why so? I was treating the exercise just as a means to an end, a process that I had to get to, while neglecting my diet and sleep (which I *currently* need to improve).

I was going through the motions and believing somehow (and very wrongly) that there wasn’t a need for planning and thinking, that essentially as long as I put in the bare minimum each day, everything was peachy keen and great.

It was not.

I gained weight, lost self-motivation, experienced some depression (granted, once again, there was a breakup at the time), and just let myself go… Even though I was working out every single day and hadn’t missed a day.

Does it seem strange?

Well I’m sorry, but you’ll just have to accept that because that’s what happened T_T

So, you might ask.

If that happened to you despite the fact that you showed up all the time, what’s the value of showing up in the first place?

I guess my answer to that is that it showed me that showing up was merely a necessary condition but it wasn’t a sufficient one – that there were a ton of other things that I had to do in this strange and epic journey towards actually feeling and looking confident in front of a mirror in order to achieve some of the outcomes that I seek to achieve for my life…

Something that’s made me try to spend my time a lot more efficiently (and you would know what I mean if you’ve seen me in real life before).

Anyway, speaking of spending time… I spent maybe seven hours talking to different people earlier before heading over to the church that I currently attend, the Damansara Utama Methodist Church; one of the more intense days that I’ve had here in a while, but definitely something very much welcome.

The result of that epic day?

I think I’m going to have an awesome sleep tonight.

Goodnight dear readers, and thanks for reading my ramblings 🙂

Yours,
V.

Korean

Today was a chaotic day for many reasons, including many hours spent trying to fit in an expensive router that I realise doesn’t even offer any additional benefit relative to my previous mesh system, realizing that I had to purchase an expensive Apple TV for my house to serve as a HomeKit hub


But for what it’s worth, the Korean exam went well!

I had very little time to do it during the course of the day partly because of work, a cello lesson, and the whole router fracas, but managed to get to it at the end of the day.

Honestly it was not easy and the studying was pretty rough, and there were some parts where it just seemed like a series of logical twists rather than an actual exam


Thankfully there were no questions that were actually like that 😂

Anyway
 The score!

That’s a 73/100 since the graded MCQs account for 80 points, and 20 additional points come from the writing section (which has yet to be scored) – the passing score is 60 out of 100; I guess I pass!

Very tired, but very happy with the result – here’s to many more good things in days ahead, I guess!