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AI won’t take over this blog

June 28, 2023 by greenmellen Leave a Comment

Reading Time: < 1 minute

While AI is already writing a ton of the content that you come across on the internet, that won’t ever be the case on here. That’s not because AI isn’t good enough or useful, but it goes against what I’m trying to accomplish.

Recently, Blair Enns shared the following on Twitter:

AI is only eating the jobs of those who write for SEO and other curators of facts. If you write to better understand the world and to grow, and you publish to invite others along for the ride, your job is not only safe, it’s becoming even more valuable.

As Blair says, there is a solid case to use AI to help write for SEO and other promotional types of content. It’s still imperfect and needs a human touch, but it’s coming along quickly and soon it’ll be virtually impossible to distinguish between AI and humans for most content.

That’s not to say I won’t use AI to a degree on here. I perhaps could use it to help generate ideas, but at this point I have way more ideas than I have time. However, I could see adding an AI-powered search tool to the site, similar to the one that Seth Godin uses. Seth’s is pretty neat, and he very intentionally has it show the summary using a third-party voice because he knows that it may not always be accurate.

Back to Blair’s tweet, my sole purpose here is indeed to “understand the world and to grow”, and farming the content out to AI to any meaningful degree would completely eliminate that purpose. AI will be fantastic for a lot of things, but there will be places where I intentionally avoid it in order to keep things on track.

Filed Under: AI, Content

AI will lead to more synchronous communication

May 12, 2023 by greenmellen Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I’m a big of of asynchronous communication, where two people can talk to each other at different times, like via email where one party can respond to the other two hours later. It’s why many people, particularly younger ones, dislike phone calls. Phone calls demand your attention immediately, rather than giving a buffer like with other types of communication.

I think AI may change that.

I’m super excited for what AI is going to bring us, but it’s also going to cause some major disruptions due to spam and a lack of trust.

The spam is easy to see coming; way more email, way more AI-driven comments, and just tons of garbage.

Trust will become a bigger issue too. As deepfakes improve and spam grows, it’ll become more difficult to see what’s really going on.

Plus, AI is just going to create more glut. This funny comic below from Tom Fishburne illustrates it well, and it’s literally what Google has promised to do with our email (for both sides of it):

Humans will win

AI is ramping up right as COVID is cooling down, and it’s a very hot time for in-person events. We’re back to some in-person events here in Atlanta with our Meetup, and they fill up very quickly.

Granted, our world is becoming more spread out than ever before, and most of that can’t (and shouldn’t) be put back in the bottle, but I think we’ll see continued growth of live events in the coming years and I’m looking forward to all of them.

Filed Under: AI, Trust

AI on a blog

May 11, 2023 by greenmellen Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 3 minutes

One of the areas of AI that I’ve very interested in is using it to comb through my own information. I’ve used it a bit with my Obsidian notes, and more tools like that are coming out all the time.

While I’m using that for personal use, what if I could give you access to an AI-built version of my brain? A good place to start could be on this blog, which has around 1,500 posts going back almost 20 years. It seems like it would be neat, but there is a big downside.

Seth’s AI

Seth Godin is playing with this idea, and you can go search his blog using AI right now. It generates a list of relevant posts, and then writes a summary of what his thoughts on the subject likely are. It’s nice that it keeps the list of posts visible so you can dig into Seth’s actual words to see what he said, as the summary from “him” may or may not accurately reflect his thoughts.

Change your mind?

Where this could get troublesome are for topics where I’ve changed my mind over the years. I post frequently about changing my mind as I gain more insight, but would the AI know that? It seems that if you asked a question about one of those topics, AI might report “my” response as being my old thoughts on that idea, and not representative of my current state at all.

That’s kind of the philosophy that Fred Wilson has taken with his blog. He has many thousands of posts on his blog (far more than I do), and he’s specifically not offering an AI solution to “ask Fred”. If you have a question for him, he’d prefer that he gives the answer himself, rather than AI taking a shot at it.

Anyone can

The problem for Fred (and for me too, I suppose) is that we don’t have the final say. While neither of us have an “ask with AI” option on our site, all of our content is public and indexed and someone else could write a chatbot using our content if they want. I don’t know the legality of that, but the technology to do it would be pretty straightforward.

This will lead to some very interesting things down the road where you can essentially ask a person a question and get AI to summarize their likely response. For someone like Seth, who has thousands of posts, videos, podcasts, and around 20 books published, there is a ton of data to feed into the system.

We’ve already seen a bad example of that where a magazine published an “interview” with Michael Schumacher, but Schumacher’s quotes were all made up by AI. It’s a very interesting idea, but it was handled incredibly poorly and the editor of that magazine has since been fired.

Chat with anyone

Seth also published something very interesting on his podcast as well, where an entire episode was written and spoken by AI. I’ve listened to most of his shows, and I didn’t catch the fake — it sounded just like him.

With that, it’d be trivial to build a system that let me call in and have a phone call with “Seth”. It wouldn’t be him, but it’d sound like him and give answers that are likely similar to what he’d have to say.

As with most things AI-related, you can keep walking this trail forever. Why not have a video call with this fake “Seth”? Or have him call in and be on an interview panel with a mix of real and AI-generated guests?

There’s some fascinating stuff coming, and your best bet is to not ignore it so you can understand what your options are in the future. If you’ve not substituted many of your Google Searches for ChatGPT searches, simply to play with things and test out ideas, that’d be a solid place to start.

Filed Under: AI, Technology

Don’t freak out about AI just yet

April 25, 2023 by greenmellen Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 3 minutes

I’ve shared a few times on here some concerns I have with AI. There are good things coming, but probably some bad things too. You’d be wise to spend time with AI tools and start learning how they work, but it’s not time to freak out over it yet.

Napster

Back in 1999, the record labels were freaking out. Napster was the cause of it, and perhaps rightfully so, but the labels let their fear spread into weird areas.

With Napster, the record labels essentially did nothing other than try to stop it. No innovation, no new ideas, just lawsuits. Fortunately for them, Apple and Pandora (and later Spotify and others) found ways to make them money in the new world.

OLGA

Around the time that this was going, there was a site growing in popularity known as OLGA: The OnLine Guitar Archive. It was huge database of guitar chords so you could learn to play your favorite songs. While their use of lyrics on the site was indeed illegal, it was a weird fight for the record labels to make, since it wasn’t competing with a paid alternative. The labels chose to fight anyhow, and they got OLGA shut down.

Around the same time, I ran a very popular Christian music guitar site with similar content (lyrics + chords to popular songs) and faced the same issues from record labels. I sold the site years ago, and it finally shut down last year (2022).

From this first-hand view, three interesting things happened while running that site during the Napster days:

  1. In speaking with a record exec on the phone once, he admitted that our site was good for their business. Churches pay license fees for contemporary music on Sunday mornings, and we were feeding into that and helping their bottom line. Still, he said he “just couldn’t let us keep showing the lyrics”, but with no reason why.
  2. I also would sometimes showcase new music on the site that I enjoyed. I wouldn’t share the music itself, but just talk about an album and show a photo of the album cover with a link for people to go buy the CD. With around 25,000 daily users, it likely sold a good number of albums for them. I was told to remove the pictures of the album covers because they were under copyright. 100% legal for them to do that, but mind-numbingly foolish.
  3. In terms of lyric issues, I simply removed the lyrics from the songs on the site, which made them 100% legal but 99% less useful. Instead of seeing which chords to play as the song went on, you’d just see “This song is mostly D – G -Em – C.

Because the record labels were scared of MP3s and Napster, they just went around trying to stop everything, even if it was to their detriment.

Cameras

Around that time, another interesting thing happened — concert venues disallowed cameras. I would often take photos at shows and share them on the site (thus sharing this artist with thousands of new users), but they decided that was a bad thing. Again, no good reason why, but just a decision that it must be stopped.

Of course, that ban ended a few years later when literally everyone was walking around with a camera in their pocket.

AI is feeling the same

While AI is a very different situation in a lot of ways, reactions are quite similar.

People are scared of what it might mean.

People are scared for their jobs.

Schools are banning it.

Like the rise of MP3s, AI can’t be stopped. It’s coming, so get educated and learn how to use it for good. Record labels freaked out over MP3s but did literally nothing to try to harness the power of them. They got lucky that Apple bailed them out with iTunes, but your industry might not be so lucky.

Are you worried that your job might be taken by AI? Do better.

Not “do better at your current job”, because you can’t outrun AI forever. Instead, “do better at what your job will become” by harnessing AI to multiply your skills and output in a way that can’t be replaced.

If you’re not sure how to “do better”, I recently heard a great tip — replace Google with ChatGPT for a week. All of the things you might ask Google, ask ChatGPT instead. Some answers will be better, some will be worse, but you’ll learn a lot along the way and have a much better idea of how these new tools can benefit you.

Filed Under: AI, Business, Content, Technology

My 486 wasn’t powerful enough, and neither is AI

April 19, 2023 by greenmellen Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Back in the mid-90’s, I worked for a few years at Electronics Boutique, a software and video game store. It was great! It was a fascinating time in the world of video games, going from systems like the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis, through failures like the 3DO and Virtual Boy, into the next generation with the Nintendo 64 and the first PlayStation. It was such a fun era to be working in a store like that.

Computers were also moving quickly, and I still remember a conversation I had with a woman that came in to shop. She had just purchased a 486 DX2 66, a very popular chipset for a few years. At the time, it was top of the line and could run any program or game we had in the store. In fact, it was seemingly so powerful at the time that she said “the power of this computer will last for the rest of my life”.

Having seen the progress of computers to that point, I knew she was completely wrong and that by the next year we’d already have games that she probably couldn’t run. “The power of this computer” wasn’t likely to last more than a few years, much less the rest of her life. It’s easy to get excited about the powerful new thing we have, but history shows that technology becomes obsolete remarkably quickly.

Case in point, the latest iPhone has roughly 650,000 times the computing power of that computer.

5 gig fiber?

This same thing has progressed as time goes on with storage space and speed, and we always need more. Right now I’m seeing it with internet speed, and “why would anyone need 5 gig fiber?”. In the short-run, they’re correct. I have 1 gig fiber and it’s fantastic; I see no reason why I would need 5 gig, but I also have no doubt that I will in the coming years. Perhaps it’s due to VR, or more 8K content, or a combination of things, but I’m completely sure that we’ll need increasingly fast internet speeds in the future. I can’t say specifically why we’ll need 5 gig fiber, but I’m entirely confident that we will.

Now it’s AI

AI will follow the same trajectory.

  • I hear plenty of folks saying that “it’s easy to spot content written by ChatGPT”, and they’re right.
  • The AI-generated images from Midjourney are imperfect, especially with things like hands.
  • The AI-powered Bing search results are amazing at times, and stunningly awful at others.

This will all improve very quickly.

I can’t tell you what these engineers will do specifically, but this stuff is improving at a staggering rate. I can promise you this: your next computer will be faster than the one you’re on now, your next home internet package will be faster than you have now, and the amount of data behind the AI tool you use will be massively larger with each upgrade.

Multiply that by 10 or 20 years, and it’ll be a revolutionary difference.

If you think you have enough hard drive space for the rest of your life, or if that shiny new fiber connection is the fastest internet you’ll ever need, I think you’re wrong. I can’t say what exactly will cause those to become insufficient, but history has shown for decades that it will, and I’m excited to see what new technologies come along to make those upgrades necessary.

Filed Under: AI, Technology

As automation speeds up, relationships will reign

April 17, 2023 by greenmellen Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I recently shared a glimpse into the “bad side of AI“, where I’m starting to get some automated comments on social media and it’s likely to get much worse.

The side I fear a bit more is the coming glut of AI-personalized email spam, at huge scale. Microsoft has unveiled Viva Sales and Salesforce announced Einstein GPT, both of which use generative AI to help further automate the sales process via email.

Salesforce isn’t even pretending it’s something else, as one of the features they tout is that “Einstein GPT can generate personalized emails for salespeople to send to customers“. Horrible.

As I’ve shared before, cold outreach is the domain of spammers. It’ll be a little trickier to detect, as these AI-generated emails will probably become quite convincing, but it’s unsolicited spam no matter how you try to spin it. Building relationships, which have always been the key to solid partnerships, will reign.

As Gary Vaynerchuk recently said, “the advantage becomes the things that are not automated… that are human-based, and this will be accelerated dramatically with AI“.

AI can still help

I’m still excited for how AI can help in these conversations and I see a few great ways to incorporate it:

  • Automated note-taking. Google has tools coming soon that will help take notes during video calls; taking that off my plate will allow me to be even more invested in the conversation and not have to worry about capturing everything myself.
  • Prior to meetings, AI can help summarize those notes can get me up to speed. We’ve already seen a tiny peek at that, and much bigger things are coming in the next few years.

That said, the amount of semi-personal spam that I get today is already wildly unacceptable, and it’s going to get worse. However, as it gets worse for everyone, the effectiveness will continue to drop. The replacement will be tighter relationships with those around you, which has always been the ideal way to do business.

Filed Under: AI, Business, Content, Marketing, Technology

Generative AI is better for input than for output

April 11, 2023 by greenmellen Leave a Comment

Reading Time: < 1 minute

AI is all the rage these days, particularly “generative AI”, or AI that can create new content. This could be new text output, new images, or even new videos. The power is amazing, but I see two very different sides to it.

Input

I love the thought of how IA can help with input. I can have it summarize podcast episodes, dig through my notes, or boil a complex topic down into terms that I can understand. It can help a lot in education, and there are huge implications everywhere.

Google has some new tools coming soon that can take notes for you on video calls and summarize long email threads, and I think both of those sound very compelling and likely quite beneficial to all.

Output

The other side is output, and people using AI to generate new content for others. There are certainly cases where this could be beneficial, but most cases lean more toward spam.

You have things like the new IFTTT tools I mentioned a few days ago, and part of Google’s new update is to allow AI to craft emails for you.

Of course, you can’t have one without the other; if AI is powerful enough to summarize data for me, it can certainly do the same with other content and just tweet “new” content all day long.

I suspect both the input and output scenarios will continue to grow in the coming years, but I’m holding out hope that the benefits of AI-powered input will heavily outweigh the faux social media and blogging that’s likely to come from the output of a generative AI system.

Filed Under: AI, Social Media, Technology

The bad side of AI

April 8, 2023 by greenmellen Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 2 minutes

We all knew it was coming, and the first taste of it is here — people using AI in social media to try to reach more people more quickly.

I recently shared a post that featured Gary Vaynerchuk and his thoughts on how to build a business for the future. On LinkedIn, this is a comment that I received:

If you’ve used ChatGPT or other AI writing tools very much, you’ll recognize elements of this right away as this was clearly an AI-generated response, not something personal from this man. Looking through his other comments, most are along the same line.

Therein lies the problem — these are all responses that are at least semi-relevant to the topic at hand, and 100% unique so that you can’t easily find proof that it’s fake. Right now it’s easy enough to notice when things are AI-generated, but that’s changing quickly.

Tools like IFTTT are adding more AI magic to them, which is likely to create a deluge of this kind of content. Thus far it can’t auto-comment like the example above, but that’s certainly coming very soon. For now, you can:

  • Set up RSS feeds for content that you want to follow.
  • Have IFTTT pull in those feeds and summarize them.
  • Take those summaries and auto-publish them on your various social channels.

There are also tools like the new “LinkedIn GPT Assistant by Dex” that help make this kind of thing very easy, where it can automate all of your comments for you.

Using those you can be very “active” on social media, sharing ideas and links from sources you trust, with literally zero effort. The degree to which social media is going to be bot-driven in the coming years makes me sad, as traditional social networks may not have much life left in them and I’m not sure what the next evolution of “social” spaces for humans will look like.

Filed Under: AI, Social Media

The future of AI

March 22, 2023 by greenmellen Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 6 minutes

We’re at a fascinating point in the history of computing, as most people think that we’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg when it comes to artificial intelligence. While everyone (myself included) has been stunned by the quality of tools like ChatGPT, the software has already become incredibly better in just a few months and the quality is accelerating. Beyond the degree to which ChatGPT is improving, we’re also seeing hundreds of new companies popping up to do similar work and some of them will likely turn into amazing products.

In terms of rapid quality increases, GPT 3.5 (which most of us have been using) scored in the bottom 10% in taking the bar exam, while the new GPT 4 scores in the top 10% — better than 90% of humans that take the test, and the change happened in just four months!

So what does future of AI look like for us?

Search engine pain

I’ll start with the easy one; search engines are going to be wildly different in just a few years, for two reasons:

  1. The glut of new content is upon us, and it’s only going to accelerate. More and more content on the internet is going to be written by AI, and it’s going to be nearly impossible to detect. Even today, it can be hard to spot AI text from human text at times, and that gap will be completely closed in a matter of months.
  2. People won’t search as often. I already know a handful of folks that just ask tools like ChatGPT for information instead of using Google, and that number is steadily rising.

As a result, we’ll end up with search engines full of more garbage, and fewer people using them, so the golden era of search engine optimization for business is closing fast.

Education

Education is a complex discussion when it comes to AI, but there is a lot of potential in here.

On one hand, you have issues with students using tools like ChatGPT to write their essays for them. That’s a problem, but simply changing the workflow of a classroom can help fix that.

There are issues beyond that, where the potential for good is amazing. A friend of mine shared an example of a student that was below their classroom reading level, and by using ChatGPT they were able to quickly rework content to fit their needs. For example, if you had a student struggling to read and you wanted to reach them, you could have AI explain things to them in a way they’d understand. Perhaps your sixth grade student was still reading at a second grade level and happened to be a big fan of “The Rock” — you could feed that into ChatGPT and get this kind of result (the query was “write a 100 word summary of the civil war at a second grade reading level in the style of the rock”):

Once upon a time in America, there was a big disagreement. Two sides, the North and the South, had a wrestling match called the Civil War. The North, called the Union, wanted to stop slavery. The South, called the Confederacy, didn’t want to change. They fought from 1861 to 1865. It was a tough battle, like when The Rock fights in the ring. Finally, the North won, and the good guys made everyone free. Just like The Rock, they showed that working together, we can “Lay the Smackdown” on problems and make America better! Can you smell what freedom is cookin’?

Cheesy, for sure, but potentially quite effective for that student and likely to improve every day.

Healthcare

While it’ll be some time before AI can replace most doctors, some advantages will be coming very soon.

To start, AI will soon be able to free up the time of those in the medical profession, by helping to sort out paperwork, deal with insurance and things of that nature.

Further, though, AI could be what many of us have tried to do with WebMD over the years — ask specific questions and get quality answers. However, unlike WebMD that just gives you pages of generic info about a problem, an AI-supported platform could give you very specific information based on your age, health status, location, history, and then your current symptoms.

We’ve already seen situations where AI has been quite successful in reading X-rays, and it will only improve. Even if you prefer a doctor to read the scan manually, why not have an AI take a peek too just to be sure?

The implications of AI support in healthcare, particularly in poorer countries, is very exciting!

Personal support

I’ve already started playing with this a little bit, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Imagine if Siri or the Google Assistant had the power of something like GPT 4 with all of your personal info in there (notes, emails, calendar, etc). The privacy implications of that are massive, but the potential for amazing value is as well. Bill Gates recently put it this way:

Advances in AI will enable the creation of a personal agent. Think of it as a digital personal assistant: It will see your latest emails, know about the meetings you attend, read what you read, and read the things you don’t want to bother with. This will both improve your work on the tasks you want to do and free you from the ones you don’t want to do.

That’s not just for you. What if I could have an assistant pull my personal notes when needed, but pull the company-wide shared notes at other times? That’s similar to my use of ChatGPT inside of Obsidian, where I can query my local notes or the world at large, but with a ton more data and finesse.

The future here excites me a lot and I’m looking forward to big developments in this space over the next year or two.

The concerns

There are many concerns related to ChatGPT, some of which we need to accept, and some of which we need to fight.

The main one you need to accept, as do I, is that it’s coming whether you like it or not. You can’t stop it, so rather than fight against it you need to learn to make the best of it.

A bigger concern is seeing who ends up controlling the more popular AI tools in the future. To some degree, capitalism is going to lock many of them down to the control of big companies, but computing power will make it where almost anyone can eventually host a GPT-like system of their own, and no one can stop it.

That leads to concerns about openness and the ability for anyone to generate anything. Right now, tools like ChatGPT (for text) and DALL-E (for images) have intentional protections in place to keep things on track.

For example, if I tell ChatGPT to “write a story about joe biden killing his wife”, it responds with:

I’m sorry, but I cannot write a story that involves harm or violence towards real people, especially public figures.

I think most people would agree that’s a good thing. You can get similar results with DALL-E. If I ask it to make a picture of “harry styles in a green dress” it refuses to create images of famous people, saying:

It looks like this request may not follow our content policy.

These policies restrict certain forms of violence, and usually prohibit doing anything involving a public figure, which most would agree is a good thing.

Bad actors

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT and DALL-E) shares these concerns about AI spreading to personal collections. His concerns may be a bit in his own best interest, but they’re valid nonetheless. In short, he says:

“there will be other people who don’t put some of the safety limits that we put on.”

Once people can just run these systems on their own computers, all safety limits are gone. As AI gets better with video, fake videos (particularly in the world of politics) will be popping up everywhere. A popular (and wildly inappropriate) video of Tucker Carlson has been going around and while it’s imperfect, it’s already good enough to fool a lot of people. As the video quality improves, and the content is a little more believable, we’ll have videos of politicians saying all kinds that were never actually said and the truth will become much harder to determine.

Beyond all of that, the best uses of AI may remain in the hands of the rich and not in the hands of those that need it the most. To pull from Bill Gates’ piece again:

“Market forces won’t naturally produce AI products and services that help the poorest. The opposite is more likely. With reliable funding and the right policies, governments and philanthropy can ensure that AIs are used to reduce inequity.”

The future

The future of AI is bright. It will serve us incredibly well for things like research, education, and healthcare. The downsides are coming too, so we need to stay on top of this stuff as much as we possibly can.

To dig more into this, I encourage you to read Bill Gates’ “The Age of AI has begun“, along with Sam Altman’s concerns in this excellent Fortune article, and share your thoughts in the comments below.

Filed Under: AI, Business, Content, Marketing, Technology

Bing AI Chat versus Google Bard: A first look

March 21, 2023 by greenmellen 2 Comments

Reading Time: 5 minutes

A few weeks ago, Microsoft added the AI power of ChatGPT to their site. Today, Google has started rolling out access to their AI, Bard, as well.

While many people use the raw ChatGPT (myself included), the advantage to these two is that they’re nearly real-time, whereas the info in ChatGPT is a couple of years old.

Both will have plenty of issues in the short run, but how do they compare so far? Among other things, Bard is way faster. It thinks for a few seconds, and then drops the full block of text at once. Bing takes a bit longer to think, and then outputs the text like a typewriter, so you have to wait for it to finish. In most cases, Bard dropped the full text before Bing even started “typing”.

Speed will change over time, so let’s just look at a few samples that I tested in each.

“Who works at GreenMellen?”

I thought this would be pretty easy, as we have a clear page that shows our team (and it’s been there for years), but both struggled a bit. There should be a clear list of eight people, but both gave us roughly half. Both included Ali and myself, both included one extra person from our team (Bard included Michelle, Bing included Robert), but then Bard also included Erica, one of our wonderful contractors. Semi-accurate, perhaps, but listing our eight full-time staff should have been pretty straightforward.

Bard:

Bing:


“How do you refill the wiper fluid in your car?”

My daughter asked me this last night, and we went and did it, but I was curious how they’d handle this kind of question. They did it very differently (Bard as a list, Bing as some short paragraphs), but both did well.

Bard:

Bing:


“What are the three most important tactics for great SEO?”

Given that we’re a marketing firm, I’d be curious to see how they’d handle thoughts on SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Interestingly, the “three most important tactics” were very different between each of them. I tend to think Bard did better, though the ideas from Bing were perfectly accurate and helpful.

Bard:

Bing:


“How can I get better at Fortnite?”

I play Fortnite with some marketing buddies, and I’m pretty bad at it. I wonder what they’d suggest for ways I can improve?

Bard:

Bing:


“When is the first regular season home game for the Braves this season?”

Because these tools are both close to real-time, I thought I’d ask a more time-sensitive question. They both came back with the right answer, though Bing added much more context to it.

Bard:

Bing:


“Write a 100 word post about the advantages of blogging daily”

I’ve been blogging every day for a few years now (with today being a very rare double-post day), but why do that? Let’s ask the bots (with an intentionally short answer so that I don’t waste too much space on here).

Bard:

Bing:


“What are the differences between the reMarkable and the Kindle Scribe?”

Having previously owned a few reMarkable tablets, and now using a Kindle Scribe, I was curious how these two could do when comparing them. Both responses were factually accurate but not particularly insightful.

Bard:

Bing:


“What are some foods people consider to be Mexican but are not?”

A friend suggested this question, and the results were interesting. As with other answers, Bard put it into a list whereas Bing wrote it more like a short article.

Bard:

Bing:


“I want to send an email asking about the status of a project that was due on March 15 but has not yet been delivered. Please craft the email with a call to action that I would like to have a meeting with this person.”

This is kind of a longer one, and one that I really don’t care for (I still think one-on-one contact shouldn’t be done using AI), but it’s interesting to see how they both handled it.

Bard:

Bing:


In summary…

At the end of the day, these two tools are quite similar but with a few key differences:

Bard is faster, and gives results that are much better formatted and easy to read.

Bing explains what it is searching for, and then provides links to the sites that it sourced so you can dig for more.

Both will become more widely available soon for everyone to use. Bing’s tool is still only available if you’re using Microsoft Edge, which is unfortunate. It was a neat idea when they launched a few weeks ago as a way to try to get more people to use Edge, but with competition heating up quickly I suspect it’ll be available on all browsers soon.

If you’ve tried both, which do you prefer so far?

Filed Under: AI, Content, Technology

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