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Hi, this is Stephen.
Today we have a special bonus episode, which is a crossover episode with the Business English podcast. Rob and I talk about artificial intelligence, its effects on the world, its possible future effects, how people are using it to learn English, and other topics. And
This is the first half of the episode, and if you want to listen to the second half, then you can find it on the podcast feed of the Business English podcast, where it has also been released today. So you can listen to both parts of the episode, but you have to find the other half in the podcast feed of the Business English podcast. There's also a link in the show notes.
Send7 is free, but if you would like to have access to all of our transcripts, including this one, vocabulary lists, worksheets and world news quizzes, you can become a supporter at send7.org. Okay, here's my conversation with Rob. This is Stephen from Send7, the Simple English News Daily podcast. And this is Rob from the Business English podcast.
Well, it's great to be here with you, Rob. Today, we're doing something a little bit different. We're doing a crossover episode. We are having part of the episode dropped on the Send7 feed and part of the episode dropped on your feed. And today, we are talking about AI, which is something which really I think you know a lot more about than I do. But well, here we go.
Yeah, I mean, full disclaimer, full disclosure up front here. I'm not in the AI space professionally, although I am a consumer of its services, so to speak. And I also use a little bit of the commercial services as well because I sort of integrate it into my business. So it sort of assists me there. So yeah, happy to riff on a few points with you today, Stephen.
Brilliant. Yeah, I also use a little bit of AI, not in the process of making the podcast, but sometimes I've started dabbling in a few things, which we can talk about as we go along. But you mentioned maybe talking a little bit about the history of AI, starting from Alan Turing.
Yeah, so I wanted to give a little bit of a backstory. And obviously, the roots run very deep here. And I wanted to highlight one specific element of the history of artificial intelligence. A man named Alan Turing, because he was working here and was born here in the UK, an Englishman, actually. He was...
Quite a famous mathematician of the day. Probably one of the most famous ones. Have you ever heard of him, Stephen? I have, but embarrassingly, I don't know much about him other than he was a code breaker. And quite recently he was added to our 50 pound notes, which are quite rare to see because they're so valuable, but that's an impressive thing if he's been able to get on there. But yeah, I'm sure you can tell me a lot more about him. Well,
Well, it doesn't get much better than that, does it? Your face is now on the most valuable piece of currency in your country. Yeah, so that's pretty good. Yeah, so a brilliant mathematician, Alan Turing, and he is widely considered one of the pioneers of what we would now call artificial intelligence.
building one of the first thinking machines during the Second World War. As you alluded to, he was part of some secret code breakers working at a place called Bletchley Park. Fantastic film actually called The Imitation Game with Benedict Cumberbatch, fantastically representing the man and the legend, Alan Turing.
But potentially most notably, he came up with this concept like the Turing test. Have you ever heard of it?
Yeah, I have heard of the Turing test. Maybe I can tell you what I think it is. Yeah, please. Let's do it. Let's do it. Yeah, you can correct me, I'm sure. The Turing test test. Is it the Turing test? Yeah, exactly. Let's see if Stephen can pass the Turing test test. So I think the Turing test is something like...
whether a computer is able to pretend to be a human or pass tests as if it's a human so that it can essentially pretend to be a human. Is it something like that? It is that, exactly. The machine or the computer passes the Turing test if the human that it's interacting with cannot tell that it's interacting with a machine.
This should be throwing up red flags now in people's minds, as I believe that we're edging ever so close to this moment, certainly through the advent of technology.
chat bots, for example, interacting with website chat bots or Instagram chat bots. Any experience with this? Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean, I mentioned before that I've started to use a little bit of AI. And actually, the main thing I've done is something I never would have imagined that I would have done, which is actually having a conversation with a chat bot.
chat gbt basically about just ideas just trying to get general ideas uh for things um and it's really impressive it's just so much faster than looking up looking things up on the internet you know like for example if i if i need some new software and i want to work out which new software i need um rather than going through loads of google searches which i might do
ChatGPT is much faster at giving me five suggestions that might be useful or something like that. So I have been speaking to AI, which is if you told me that I would have been speaking to AI in a conversational way five years ago, I wouldn't have believed you.
Yeah, rather interesting pivot, actually. I think that the space is experiencing in general, there are a lot of thought leaders now that are looking at this and basically saying, you know, Google is in serious trouble because people are not really Googling much anymore and they're going straight on to the AI version to just get the direct answers with the references afterwards. So, yeah, Google producing some great stuff, but we'll come on to that in just a minute. Amazing. Yeah.
If you don't mind me asking, we were just talking about the Turing test there. Do you think that ChatGPT passes the Turing test? It's a great question. I feel that this is...
I think there are tiers, there are layers to this. I think through a basic interaction, I think many people, it would seem to me that many people would struggle to see the difference between an AI response and a human response. For example, a chatbot on a website, if you're
interacting with an AI chatbot, it may ask you how your day's going. It will pick up your IP address, ask about the weather where you are currently. It will be able to go into the calendar and look at availability dates and get back to you, make adjustments, which isn't beyond the norms for a normal customer service representative. However, on the flip side,
what is the meaning of life? Um, you know, potentially some cultural nuances or, uh, talk about some Shakespeare and what it means to you as a person. I feel that it may give, um, widely generic answers or some social, socially pleasing responses. Uh, any experience with that? Well, in fact, what I was just thinking of when you were talking there was, uh,
an article I read in the newspaper the other day, there you go. This, this is me being very 20th century rather than very 21st century. I actually still read newspapers. And it was about how universities are having a big problem now of knowing whether or not students have submitted AI generated essays. And even their, their,
have started to be some lawyers that are working for students
to representing students who have been accused of using AI to generate their essays and them saying, no, no, no, no, I haven't. And then they go to this lawyer to, to help them out, to, to fight back against the university. So crazy, crazy case. But in that would suggest that if university professors who are marking these essays are not able to tell whether or not, um,
this has been made by AI or actually think that it has been made by AI or, or, or something, then yeah, maybe it does pass the Turing test. Um, or, well, especially if,
it was actually written by a person and then they think it's written by AI. Then that's almost like a person not passing the Turing test, isn't it? It gets messy very quickly. Yeah, it does get messy. Yeah, yeah. We can touch on, I want to blow this wide open a bit later on with using AI to learn English because I've got quite a bit to say on that, as I'm sure you have as well, about this idea of using AI to,
to help you communicate across cultures, across languages, and to improve your English. But we'll touch on that in a moment. Well, we've sort of covered the Alan Turing element. So Alan Turing test, yes, we're potentially there in some areas, but not in other areas. But you can be sure that it's coming. What about currently? So moving into the present,
from the historical context of AI, it'd be nice to just riff about the current usage at any platforms and things like that. Okay. Well, I've just told you a little bit about me now talking to AI occasionally to get some ideas. You mentioned before that you probably use it a lot more extensively than I do. So what do you do with AI? So...
As a consumer, just using sort of the chatbot interface, which would be, you know, ChatGPT or Claude or Grok or Perplexity, Gemini, you know, there's a whole host of sort of frontrunners out there. I think Facebook or Meta, sorry, naughty, Meta are now doing something with Llama, I think.
Sorry to cut you off, but they're all basically the same thing, right? All of those names you've just mentioned there, they're all just chatbots, right? On the front, the interface for the individual, yes, you can just chat to it, but they do have other...
other systems that you can tap into, APIs, which you can tap into to leverage the large language models, basically. That's the list of the most popular consumer-facing AI chatbots. Obviously, there are many more applications at the corporate levels that businesses can use to integrate into their systems, but
Purely focusing on the chatbots, these seem to be the frontrunners at the moment. Again, disclaimer, I'm not in the space, so please feel free to tear me apart in the comments for any slip-ups. But the idea is that, yes, the average individual can use a chatbot to surface content.
any information or use it as an echo chamber. For me, I'm using Grok. I quite enjoy using Grok. However, I know that Claude by Anthropic is also a very good large language model, LLM.
uh to to help you generate ideas it's very good for sort of written content copywriting um it seems to be uh well used by copywriters and people in the creative space yeah and then there was a few months ago deep seek came out and i think the surprising thing about that was that um
people, I don't know, people who know more about AI than I do, thought that China was a long way behind the United States on the creation of AI. But then they brought out DeepSeq, which was very, very similar, like a similar standard to what ChatGPT is and Claude and whatever, right? Yeah, that's right. Yeah. I don't know much about DeepSeq. I've never used it. But yeah, very, very much aware of the fact that the...
the countries that were developing large language models, um, sort of took a sharp intake of breath. It was like, Oh, um, what's this then? And obviously deep speak, um, doing some great work, doing some great work. But, um, I mean, I can talk about controversies on, um, that my news-based podcast controversy is all right. Okay. Um,
the deep seek model, if you ask it certain questions that go against the Chinese communist party's vision of the world, it refuses to answer them. Like, um, I've seen, um, articles because again, I haven't used it myself. Um, I've seen articles where they say, can you say an insult of, uh, you know, uh, Mexican president Claudia Scheinbaum and it will do that. And then if it says, can you also insult, uh, president Xi Jinping? And it just refuses to, um,
And if you say, you know, can you tell me some nuance about the situation of Taiwan as to whether it's a country or not or something like that? It will just say Taiwan is an inalienable part of China.
Something like that, like really basic without going into more nuance of the situation. Or can you say what happened in Tiananmen Square? It will just refuse. No, I don't want to talk about that. Let's talk about something like that, which kind of gives rise to this is the most obvious way of...
of AI being manipulated. I'm sure it's manipulated in other ways by different people, but as far as having the power to choose what people can see and what they can't see, I think the DeepSeek model showed the most obvious case of their biases being plugged in to the system.
Absolutely. Absolutely. Like you say, it sort of echoes. Well, if it's made by a human, it's going to have errors in it. So I think that's one of the challenges. I don't know what model it was, who it was, if it was open AI, if it was Google. But not too long ago, sort of the last 18 months or so, I remember...
an article being written about the image generation qualities of one of those big players.
when it was asked to produce pictures of the British monarchy. And this was done in such a manner that it could not have been possible. You know, the British monarchy were portrayed in a way that they just never would have been. And so there were questions raised about how factually accurate
I think Elon Musk, I just want to take this one step further. I think Elon Musk, and I'm quoting from Elon or paraphrasing, should I say, where there was said about what is worse, is it to misgender someone or thermonuclear global war? And the answer was misgendering someone. And it's like,
I don't know about this. It's a bit challenging. Actually, seeing as you've mentioned Elon Musk there, seems to be able to slip his way into every single conversation in the world, doesn't he? Yes. Great marketing. Actually, a few weeks ago, I think it was only a few weeks ago, there was a short amount of time
where Grok, again, I didn't use this myself. I saw this happening. Yes, I saw the article. Yeah, you know what I'm saying, really. Where Grok was randomly telling people about white genocide in South Africa when they weren't asking about it at all. They were saying like, can you give me a recipe for a cupcake? And then they'd be like, yeah, this is a good recipe. And regarding the white genocide going on in South Africa, and it was just completely...
And from what I could read, it seems to have been that Grok's company... What is the company behind Grok? Is it X? XAI. XAI, yeah. Said that this was something like a rogue employee doing something small for a few minutes.
which in theory, I mean, that rogue employee must have been Elon Musk, right? Would actually have the power to change something like that and would also have the kind of desire to have this focus on white genocide in South Africa. I mean, it might not have been, but it seems quite likely that that would have been something that Elon Musk would have done.
I mean, these hallucinations in these models are really, like you said about the, you know, the deep seek or grok or any of the others. I'm sure it's going to carry on dropping clangers. I think that's quite a good phrase to know. If you don't know that one, go and look it up to drop a clanger. Yeah. Great. Yeah. Making mistakes.
But yes, the idea of the current language, large language models in their current form, very exciting space to be. I want to address this idea, and it almost seems to be the battle cry of the anti-AI people, is it's going to take my job. Any initial thoughts on this? Any opening arguments? Yeah.
Okay, I hope you've enjoyed the first half of this episode. If you would like to listen to the second half, it has been released today on Rob's podcast feed. So you can search in your podcast app for the Business English podcast. There's also a link in the show notes. The next episode of Send7 will be Monday's news in seven minutes. Have a great weekend.
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