A chat with a bot

May 25th 2022

A chat with a bot

This is a conversation I had recently with a ‘Chat Bot’ called Emerson.

Inspired by Dr Alan D. Thompson’s amazing YouTube channel which show cases the remarkable advances in artifical intelligence, I decided to create this short film using similar techniques that he uses. I hope you find it entertaining…

and I hope our future Robotic Overlords are not offended!

The technology

Emerson chat app

In order to have a conversation, I used the mobile phone app called Emerson, built by the company QuickChat.ai. It uses the GPT-3 language model and responds remarkably quickly to questions entered into a text window. Sometimes quirky, but often surprisingly knowledgeable, it is quite a bizarre experience.

Synthesia avatars

The text conversation was then transcribed and sent to Sythesia.io to bring the conversation to life. They provide a remarkable service that creates lifelike avatars that speak the text provided.

Adobe Premiere

Finally, I edited the corresponding replies in Adobe Premiere to give the impression of real conversation.

GPT-3

GPT-3 is the third-generation language prediction model created by OpenAI, a San Francisco-based artificial intelligence research laboratory founded by Elon Musk and others in 2015.

GPT-3’s full version has a capacity of 175 billion machine learning parameters and was introduced in May 2020. It is part of a trend in natural language processing (NLP) systems of pre-trained language representations.

The model has been trained on various datasets such as Common Crawl, WebText2, Books1, Books2 and Wikipedia, amounting to hundreds of billions of words and is capable of coding in CSS, JSX, Python, among others.