CurmudgeonGPT

It is late December 2023. And after three months of the days feeling considerably shorter and darker, and winter now officially on us, rather than just feeling like it should be on us, and with nothing to do in the Twixtmas lull, apart from eat soup and the like, I have been dabbling with the dark arts of AI. Fortunately, my life is already far enough advanced that I can look at AI’s march towards parity with humans (or so some papers tell us) and think that it is unlikely to have much bearing on my remaining time on the planet.

Today, Nephew popped over to set up my wife’s new laptop and to also show me around ChatGPT. I’ve heard so much about it, but had resisted the urge to play around with it until now. And so, over a cuppa and biscuits, he showed me a browser window that looked like an early Internet chatroom. Fortunately, it didn’t ask me “A/S/L?” as they did back in the 1990s. I might have responded that I was still 39. A bit like when you learn a language at school and are seemingly so tongue-tied in a ski resort that you tell a girl you are 11 years old and like to play ping pong.

Will the real Curmudgeon please step forward?

He’s sent me pictures generated using AI this year – some of the popular ones – like the Pope in a puffa jacket, composite pictures of super models and deep fakes (although I find it quite shallow personally). I even had a go myself, and managed a suitably unlike me likeness of myself, that I tried to change my Twitter profile picture to it. And failed. Harrumph.

Your AI Curmudgeon

After letting me type in a few prosaic little questions (like: How do you get from London to Vienna over land?) I surrendered control of the keyboard to nephew. He wanted to show me how it could seemingly answer more or less any question you threw at it, could summarise texts, even translate. And so he entered some “prompts”. He knocked up stories and little articles on a number of subjects. In seconds. He then showed me how to write a prompt to plan an itinerary – telling it to go from A to B, stopping in C, changing drivers in D and E. Although as the output was text only I was still slightly unconvinced. After all there is Google maps or a SatNav for all of that, right?

Can someone train this LLM for me?

Naturally he then pushed the laptop over to me to get me to have another go. I instantly thought about what I would like it to do. Spying my KlimaTicket bumpf on the desk, I decided to ask it to give me a train route to take me through all of Austria’s regional capitals, as this was something I had discussed with a friend recently, as a trip to do, starting from Linz (In Linz beginnt’s…).

In seconds, it spat out a route. Linz to Vienna, Vienna to St Pölten, St. Pölten to Tulln and then Krems, then on to Eisenstadt. From Eisenstadt to Graz, and then Graz to Klagenfurt. Then Klagenfurt to Villach to Salzburg and then out to Innsbruck and Bregenz before heading back to Linz. All presented as bullet points. Hmm, plausible I thought, although I remarked that it seemed illogical to go through St Pölten to get to Vienna and then go back to St Pölten. And then on to Tulln and Krems. Both of these suggestions were what nephew confirmed were “hallucinations”.

Then I asked it how it would get me from Eisenstadt to Graz. It clearly had no idea about changing in Ebenfurth and Wiener Neustadt, and told me that I could get a direct train. Not a lot of good, and no substitute for the encyclopaedic knowledge of the ÖBB rail network that some of my friends have. Needless to say, I remained unconvinced.

Taking on a new persona

Nephew then showed me how ChatGPT could “explain the Internet to Kaiser Franz Josef” – and knocked up a little prompt that did the job – wittily written and in such a way that the erstwhile Emperor might have been able to have understood some of the uses of the Internet from his 19th century perspective. For me it was quite quaintly enchanting that it thought to suggest writing it in a letter.

Eure Majestät Kaiser Franz Josef,

Es ist mir eine Ehre, Ihnen das Konzept des Internets auf eine Weise zu erklären, die sich auf das 19. Jahrhundert bezieht, da Sie in dieser Zeit lebten.

Stellen Sie sich vor, dass das Internet eine Art magischer Telegraph ist, der es ermöglicht, nicht nur kurze Nachrichten, sondern auch Informationen in Form von Bildern, Texten und Klängen über weite Entfernungen zu senden. Dieser “elektronische Telegraph” ist jedoch nicht auf Kabel und Drähte beschränkt, sondern erstreckt sich über die Welt und verbindet viele unterschiedliche “Telegraphenstationen” miteinander.

Anstatt physische Briefe zu schicken, könnten Sie sich vorstellen, dass Menschen auf der ganzen Welt Informationen durch diesen unsichtbaren Telegraphen senden. Man kann nicht nur Worte austauschen, sondern auch Bilder von weit entfernten Orten teilen, als ob man ein Fenster in die Welt anderer Menschen öffnen würde.

Die “Bibliotheken” dieses magischen Telegraphen sind riesig und enthalten eine Fülle von Wissen aus verschiedenen Zeiten und Orten. Man kann durch diese “elektronische Bibliothek” blättern und auf Informationen zugreifen, als ob man in den Regalen einer riesigen weltweiten Bibliothek stöbern würde, ohne den physischen Raum zu verlassen.

Auch können Menschen Ideen miteinander teilen, ähnlich wie sie es in Gesprächen tun, aber nun können sie es tun, ohne sich physisch zu treffen. Handwerker können ihre Erfindungen zeigen, Künstler ihre Werke präsentieren und Wissenschaftler ihre Entdeckungen mit Menschen auf der ganzen Welt teilen, als ob sie alle in einem riesigen virtuellen Raum versammelt wären.

Das Internet ist in gewisser Weise wie ein Fenster in die Zukunft, ein Fenster, das es erlaubt, Verbindungen und Wissen über den gesamten Globus hinweg zu knüpfen. Ich hoffe, dass diese Analogie des “elektronischen Telegraphen” Ihnen eine Vorstellung von diesem faszinierenden Konzept vermitteln konnte.

Mit dem tiefsten Respekt,

[Dein Name]

Prompt used: Erklären Sie dem Kaiser Franz Josef was das Internet ist. Vergessen Sie nicht dass er im 19. Jahrhundert lebte, und daher die Begrifflichkeiten des 21. Jahrhunderts nicht verstehen wird.

This sent me done a rabbit hole and soon had me asking ChatGPT to explain about Niki Lauda to Empress Maria Theresia. Although I don’t know what she would have made of it all. Doubtless though this will end up being used by countless school pupils for some creative writing tasks, without an iota of imagination and creativity. Let’s only hope that future literature and books do not go down this pathway. I want to enjoy what I read, safe in the knowledge that thought and effort has gone into it by an author.

The $64,000 dollar question

The other reason that my nephew had come over was in order to think about his ongoing financial situation (a far rosier one than five years ago, when he took to the high seas). Here was an area that ChatGPT couldn’t really help with. By shedding his spendthrift ways and hard work, he has managed to make a successful go of things, and is starting to earn some proper money with his endeavours. He and his girlfriend were starting to think about putting down a deposit for a flat of their own – not in rental, but to buy.

For all his high tech acumen, he still lacks some financial literacy – although his chastening experience with debt has certainly proven to be a life lesson for him. He’s learned how to put money away, live within his means and now understands how interest works, about how mortgages work and the like, but where he comes unstuck, is about working out how to plan everything. This is where my aptitude has been pressed into service repeatedly – both for him and for his mother.

The solution was far more old school – I took the backside of a discarded piece of flipchart and some pens and pencils and my scientific calculator. I realise of course that I could have asked ChatGPT to tell me how to perform compound interest calculations in Excel, but wanted to show how the mathematics from over 50 years ago was still fresh in my mind.

Twenty minutes later and with assorted graphs, scribbles, sums and formulae, I had my “Eureka!” moment. Until Nephew pointed out some new-fangled borrowing restrictions. Then I was floored by the legalese of a piece of Austrian law that talked of concepts that I didn’t know of in German or English. Nephew duly rolled up his sleeves metaphorically, and bashed out a brief little prompt on his phone. Within seconds there were some formulae from which I could start in a spare corner of the flipchart paper.

More tea, Nephew?

After all was said and done, Nephew asked, “If I buy a place, it will increase in value, right?” And at this point I knew it’d need more tea and biscuits (and a crystal ball) to answer this one. Another bare patch of the flipchart paper was quickly commandeered and I tried to sketch out what happened if you bought a property for x with financing of y and then the new value w years later of z was less than y. And thus I explained the concept of negative equity. And then I got onto the troublesome case of my sister and her Swiss franc mortgage, the maturity of which looms ever nearer, and the calculations of the shortfall get ever more alarming.

I felt like I was snatching away his dreams of home ownership, with my pessimistic caution. I’d told him to possibly save up some more so that he wasn’t at the lending ceiling. But this of course only sewed bigger doubts in my mind – what if the crash/realignment doesn’t materialise and the dream of home ownership, that is currently in touching distance accelerates away, and my caution robs him of his place on the property ladder/greasy pole.

At this point, my wife came in from the supermarket. I thought we came across as “good cop” and “bad cop”. She asked where Nephew thought he wanted to be in 10 years time (in his late 30s). He hoped that he would be well-established, hopefully earning well and maybe even married and with children, and having seen the world a bit. I had to do the sums about how to manage all of this (include “living” and “travelling”) and arrived at a conclusion that it was likely to be a decision between home ownership and saddled with a mortgage or being able to see a bit of the world, but perhaps delay getting on the property ladder.

We agreed to have a beer, and postpone any further financial powwow until the New Year. In the mean-time we have at least set a target amount that he needs to be able to not be reliant on a maximum level mortgage to buy a place, and possibly deferring by 12-18 months might prove prudent.

Maybe by that stage, we’ll be able to use ChatGPT to do all those calculations without needing to manually check them and feed them into Excel. In the mean-time, I can perhaps look forward to being able to amuse myself with frippery like explanations of the actions of Rene Benko as explained to Sisi, as soon as ChatGPT’s training reaches the end of 2023. Watch this space.