Romance On Demand

Experimenting with generative A.I. reminds me of how much I enjoyed software testing. I find coming up with interesting, and plausible, use cases and seeing what the systems do with them genuinely fun.

Back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, some friends and I took Japanese lessons. For one of the exercises, I wrote a short story about a bank manager named Tom. Because we were only learning spoken Japanese, I wrote it in rōmaji, or Latin script. Fast forward two+ decades, and I barely had any idea of what it says. So I dropped it into Google Translate; which recognized it as Japanese, but its "English" translation was basically just a trimmed version of the original rōmaji text.

So I figured I'd see what the generative A.I. systems would make of it. I asked Copilot, Perplexity, Gemini and ChatGPT 3.5 "What does this say:" and then dropped in a snippet of the text. Gemini took the prompt to be a request for information about Tom, and noted "I do not have enough information about that person to help with your request." Perplexity's translation was a bit redundant in places (and somewhat confusing for that), but it was close to the answers that ChatGPT and Copilot gave.

Getting Copilot's answer, however, was a bit of work. It initially took the romanized Japanese I provided, and wrote it out in Japanese characters, using Kanji, Hiragana or Katakana as (I presume) appropriate, so I had to then ask it to translate that text into English for me. It seemed to be fairly true to what I sort of remember writing back in the day, so I took it a step further and dropped in the entire story, which had more details of Tom's commute and how he spends his weekends and includes another character, Noriko. At the end of another two-step translation, Copilot presented some interesting choices for follow-up prompts, like: "How did Tomu-san and Noriko-san become friends?" Curious, I clicked on it.

It was an interesting exercise in generative pre-training hallucination, as Copilot spun up the plot of a cozy, cheesy romance novel, with Tom and Noriko as the stars. (Forming an interesting contrast with Gemini.) I can see how building an LLM that's programmed to allow it to expansively "infer" things from a short text sample can be useful, especially given that Copilot clearly noted that it had engaged in a "whimsical journey," but I think that I would have built the system to make it clear up-front that the offer is for what's effectively a work of speculative fiction. That would also give the system a chance to ask just what sort of fiction the user wants; as I would have chosen a much different theme than Copilot's derivative romance plot.