This is getting absolutely ridiculous.
FAIct Generator
Noted iced tea brand Snapple has released a ChatGPT-powered “fAIct Generator” — that’s “fact generator” with “AI” awkwardly stuck in the middle — that it claims “makes it easy to create facts about any topic.”
And it doesn’t take much reading between the lines to see that it’s a low-brow effort to cash in on an ongoing tech trend.
Particularly this week, tech giants are desperately trying to corner the AI chatbot market in an apparent bid to catch up with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a powerful text generator.
But there’s one giant problem that’s plaguing all of these tools right now, including Snapple’s honed-in fAIct generator: they’re absolutely terrible at telling fact from fiction.
Even tech giant Google recently got caught having its still-unreleased AI chatbot make a brazen mistake in the company’s own ad copy.
Lie to Me
At least Snapple, which has been hiding “Snapple Real Facts” under the caps of its juices for 20 years now, is well aware of ChatGPT’s shortcomings.
“As an AI, I’m new to this whole ‘existence’ thing, so I can be wrong, skewed or even inappropriate,” the tool’s website reads. “The humans at Snapple will still need to check my facts before some of them become ‘Real Facts.'”
In simple terms, Snapple’s fact generator is terrible at the one thing it was designed to do in the first place.
“Beep… Boop… Boop, that’s AI for ‘not all my facts are accurate,” a loading screen reads before it generates a “fact.”
Fake Facts
It didn’t take long for us to arrive at a dubious claim using Snapple’s useless tool. “Exoplanets can be up to 20 times the size of Earth,” it claimed, which is a vacuous statement, given the fact it didn’t specify if it was talking about the mass or radius.
Besides, it’s a likely wildly inaccurate statement regardless. The largest exoplanet to have ever been discovered is 0.78 times the mass of Jupiter — and Jupiter is 318 times the mass of Earth.
In short, it’s a silly publicity stunt that only serves to highlight the biggest drawback AI chatbots are suffering from: telling the truth.
Which makes Snapple’s tool completely pointless. And that’s the tea.
More on AI chatbots: Google’s Demo of Upcoming AI Shows It Making Huge Factual Mistake