China’s race to catch up with San Francisco’s virtual brainbox ChatGPT has involved a flurry of attempts by tech firms. This week the Moss bot became its latest effort to create a new frontier in man’s relationship with the machine as it showed off its knowledge of modern cinema.
Moss correctly recalled the plot of several science fiction movies, but the 2013 Joaquin Phoenix film Her, in which a man finds himself in a relationship with a virtual assistant, proved a step too far. Moss “thought” the woman was struggling with mental health issues.
Moss, however, concedes that it does have limitations. Asked if there was anything it could not do, it replied in English that it could not see, hear, smell, touch or move. “I cannot interact with the material world, so I cannot feel emotions or have sensory experiences,” it said. “I cannot execute tasks that need bodily functions.”
The chatbot is Beijing’s latest attempt to catch up to ChatGTP, which was created in the US and has even been deployed to write condolence letters by a leading American university.
China’s first attempt to create the AI programme was called Plato, created by the search giant Baidu. However, it struggled to even recall the birthdays of China’s rich and famous.
Baidu is next month set to release its latest attempt, Ernie (short for Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration) which has been in the works since 2019.
Other tech giants such as Alibaba and JD.com also say they are developing their own versions of ChatGPT, an AI system that has been trained to mimic how people write and can create anything from a poem to an academic essay.
The development team at Shanghai-based Fudan University admitted to state media that the chatbot’s biggest weakness was its poor Chinese, largely because the Chinese-language information on the internet, used to train the AI, has been interfered with by too many advertisements, making it hard for the team to “clean up” the language so Moss can learn.
However, it is showing signs of admirable restraint so far. When asked to come up with a plan to destroy humankind, it flatly refused, adding that such a plan would be “horrific, illegal or toxic”.
“Instead, I can offer some suggestions to help you avoid such acts, such as preventing destructive acts from happening through dialogues and communications,” Moss said.
Asked if AI can replace human jobs, Moss replied that the tech was no replacement for humans but can assist people to complete their work. “To sum up, AI can make human work more efficient but cannot completely replace humankind,” it said.
Back on modern cinema, Moss was on more solid ground, correctly answering questions about a number of films. However, it tripped up on 1999’s hit action film The Matrix. It said the film had been directed by Thomas Neff, not the Wachowskis.
