Two things that surprised me about my own chatbot

When I posted a virtual writing coach on my site that required a subscription, I got a few serious people trying it out.

When I made it free, it became a free-for-all. I wasn’t prepared for what happens when you just allow anyone to chat with your entire corpus of millions of words of insight for nothing, with no login.

Some of you people are losers

I wasn’t surprised that people asked it for help with writing their resumes or couldn’t figure out how it was supposed to help. And I wasn’t surprised that people who were simply “book-curious” asked open-ended questions and said they’d come back when they were ready.

I was surprised at the guy (I assume it was a guy) who got his jollies telling my virtual coach “f– you” and “eat a bag of . . . ” (well, you get the idea). It’s true that you don’t need to log in to have this conversation. I don’t know who you are (well, I have your IP address, but that’s all). But is this really all you can spend your time on?

I also heard from my partner tech partner at Soqratic that the same user went to their site and typed the same sorts of things.

Go ahead. Waste your time. The chatbot has infinite patience. But is this where humanity’s future is going: stupid humans having vacuous profanity-laden conversations with random chatbots?

But some of you are awesome

My favorite experience with the free writing coach was observing what happened when somebody asked it well-formed question in German.

Sure enough, it answered in German, a language I don’t speak and that appears nowhere in the corpus the coach was trained on.

I used Google Translate to translate both the question and the virtual coach’s answer into English, and that answer was exactly the same direct and challenging response I would have written, including links to my blog posts (which are, of course, in English).

I’m delighted to learn that I can apparently now counsel people in languages I don’t speak. I recently got a query from a writer in Türkiye. I told him he was welcome to try asking the coach questions in Turkish. Let’s see what happens.