McHugh's Miscellany - Letting artificial intelligence do your talking and thinking

There have been great conversations in the homes and offices of Donegal of late, about artificial intelligence in its most recent manifestation; more specifically these new Chat GPT apps that can apparently create all sorts of magic, but more likely mayhem, if left unregulated until they have created the ultimate dystopian society.
Unlike the mobile phone itself, which everyone thought was a good thing, the one word that seems to be cropping up with this new technology is “scary”.
I am reading sentences that include “smarter than humans” with a certain trepidation.
And look where that wee mobile phone has us now!
Have you travelled on a bus recently and seen two people conversing? Almost as rare as a sight of the curlew!
Last weekend I saw four people sitting down together in a cafe, enjoying their ‘kappachino expensivo’.
No-one was engaged in conversation, some appeared to be texting, others were scrolling and at one stage two were giggling, but not with something someone else had said, but rather, something that caught their eye, on their phone.
Remember those whizz kids that amazed us with their manual dexterity in solving the riddle of a Rubik’s Cube in seconds - well have you seen the speed that some of these text messages are being sent now? It is an Olympic Sport all on its own.
They were a group of young people, although I am not castigating their activities in any way, as they are simply a reflection of modern society.
One was a vaper, whom I very much doubt, was weaning themselves off cigarettes!
They are simply utilising the tools that they have been given, much in the same way that we were given out to, for listening to tunes on record players, then tapes, followed by CDs and now downloading music from the cloud.
Most will have read with interest about the “fake tan” story that caught out the Irish Times, as well as others over the past week or so.

Completely generated by AI, with fake bylines to boot!
But there will be positives as we learned last month when the staff from Ireland’s sixteen Education & Training Boards (ETBs) met to discuss the potential implications of Artificial Intelligence language models such as Chat GPT for their schools.

Agus ar deireadh
As riveting as the Ulster GAA Ulster Football championship final was at the weekend, it felt a bit like the Champions League with the added extra time and then the final being decided on penalties.
Surely in 2023 with one of the greatest games in the world that differentiates us culturally from other sports, we can come up with something more interesting than mimicking what happens with soccer across the pond and beyond. Again, soccer is a great game, but it ain’t Gaelic football.

The GAA has been happy to experiment with rules changes down the years, but surely the kick of a boot, soccer like, for a goal, should not be the differential between a good team and a better GAA team.
It is not up to me to come up with an alternative, but maybe reducing the players numbers, with a rolling subs bench in extra time, some kind of competition that would test other skills of the players, catch and kick, mixing up the numbers or the skills set, for after all, kicking a penalty is not very ‘athletic’ compared to some of the players greatest attributes.
What about each player (and why not include the substitutes - maybe a total of ten from the whole panel) getting to kick a free from the hand from the 45 metre mark.

Now that would be interesting . . .