Carte blanche to Stéphane Dompierre | Siri, Alexa and me

With their own sensitivity, artists present their vision of the world to us. This week, we give carte blanche to author and publisher Stéphane Dompierre.

I have never been in a hurry to adopt new technologies. Always a little behind, I bought a smartphone the day I lost my patience. A friend had texted me for reading suggestions and, after replying to him on my old Motorola Razr, clicking 1 three times to make a C, two times 2 to make an E, I embarked on the wave.

My start with artificial intelligence was just as slow. Although I knew about Siri and Alexa, the intelligent personal assistants from Apple and Amazon respectively, I was hesitant to discover what they were capable of. It started with “Alexa, tell me the joke of the day”, without me being bowled over by this great technological upheaval. Especially since his jokes were flat.

A few years ago, these assistants also seemed to have deafness problems: asking Siri to “call Manon Salvail” risked ending in “Okay. I’m calling your boss to tell him you’re quitting your job.” Sneezing near my iPhone was enough for him to order 5,000 round saws from Rona.

But these tools are constantly improving, and I am slowly discovering their possibilities. These days, there’s not much that satisfies me more than asking Siri, while I’m making dumplings, to start a countdown for something cooking in the oven. I only save a few seconds, time to wash my hands and start the oven timer, but I love that my phone does tasks for me. I feel like I’m in the future. Well, not the future of melting glaciers, toxic fog and burning forests, there. Let’s instead talk about the future that I imagined as a child: watches with videoconferencing (it’s done) and flying cars (on this issue, we’re dragging our feet a little). Rather than opening the basement door and yelling at the teenager that it’s time for supper, presto, I get my hands dirty under some pretext (tossing the salad with my bare hands, say) and I ask Siri to text it.

Except I don’t have dirty hands that often.

But with the arrival of ChatGPT, Gemini and a host of competitors, the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) seem to have no limits. These systems can learn, write, draw, generate countless ideas, assist us in a host of complex tasks. Already, many people use them on a daily basis.

By the way, is this column written by AI? How to know ?

I can answer you: no. It was indeed written by me.

However, I tried; I would have loved to fool you so that you could admire the prowess of the AI, by only revealing to you at the very end of the text that it was not mine. But it’s not for now. There’s still a little way to go, it seems.

The speed of the AI ​​is still impressive: 10 seconds to generate an 800-word column. That’s pretty much beyond everyone, except perhaps Fabienne Larouche when she wrote Virginia. But his humor leaves something to be desired. I asked ChatGPT for a humorous column proving that AI writes better than humans. An excerpt: “First of all, I do real research. Not like some of you, who just Google quick and dirty stuff. » The effort is worthwhile, it’s deliciously strange, but not one to slap on the thighs, let’s say. Here we were almost there: “I’m like a cat (hence my name), but better, because I don’t scratch furniture or lick my butt in public. » I admit I giggled. But it quickly degenerated, with an incomprehensible story of a chicken crossing the street to go to the internet café and a very simple (and a little outdated) joke about a Pokémon. I still emphasize this beautiful pearl of wisdom: “I am always learning, developing, becoming smarter and faster. It is a constant and never-ending process. Many people on this planet struggle to accept that they have things to learn and can improve. » Nice work, ChatGPT.

Artificial intelligence is evolving much faster than humans (especially faster than your uncle who still makes Newfies jokes), so I continue to experiment and will keep you posted on my progress. Or his progress. And if the AI ​​manages to replace me as editor, author and columnist, it might be the one to tell you about it here, with a few weird jokes about chickens and Pokémon.

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