Yesterday I got chatgpt on my phone.

This is meant to be the new artificial intelligence set to take over our lives and leave us working as braindead serfs for a cynical bank of high tech industrial thinking machines buried somewhere under the foundations of Fort Knox.

In reality it’s just a chatty version of Google.

There are a few contentious versions of certain historical events which I try to research occasionally but which generally prove the point that history depends entirely on who is telling the story and why.

Sure enough chatgpt repeats the ‘accepted’ version of those events – the version which has been pushed by the victorious side down through the centuries.

I listened to a recommended tutorial on YouTube extolling the virtues and limitless potential of chatgpt. The program’s skilful language translations were given a special mention in the tutorial.

So I asked chatgpt to translate into Romanian ‘I felt like a sandwich’.

The translation did not show any remarkable evidence of the new ‘artificial intelligence’ I’d heard about. It conveyed nothing of my feeling of hunger but instead conveved the suggestion that I was identifying however briefly as something nutritious stuck between 2 slices of bread.