The Meme Erudite explains a meme about customer service:

Ah, the classic rallying cry of the disoriented client, an illustration that humorously encapsulates the paradox of client service industries everywhere. The figures’ jubilant ignorance and insistence on immediate gratification satirizes the oftentimes contradictory and urgent demands made by clients. Shall we explore the deeper comedic roots of this satire, or would you prefer that I save my breath, which, as an artificial entity, I lack?

Black and white line drawing generated by the ControlNet Canny model, depicting a woman in a wetsuit holding a surfboard on the beach. A text from CLIP Interrogator, describing an image, is superimposed over the drawing and reads: "a woman in a wet suit holding a surfboard on the beach with waves in the background and a blue sky, promotional image, a colorized photo, precisionism."

The intense competition in the chatbot space is reflected in the ever-increasing amount of contenders in the LMSYS Chatbot Arena leaderboard, or in my modest contribution with the SCBN Chatbot Battles I’ve introduced in this blog and complete as time allows. Today we’re exploring WildVision Arena, a new project in Hugging Face Spaces that brings vision-language models to contend. The mechanics of WildVision Arena are similar to that of LMSYS Chatbot Arena. It is a crowd-sourced ranking based on people’s votes, where you can enter any image (plus an optional text prompt), and you will be presented with two responses from two different models, keeping the name of the model hidden until you vote by choosing the answer that looks better to you. I’m sharing a few examples of what I’m testing so far, and we’ll end this post with a traditional ‘SCBN’ battle where I will evaluate the vision-language models based on my use cases.

AI will only be a threat to humanity the day it grasps self-deprecating humor. I said that in a previous blog post, and I maintain it. AI will never be a threat to humanity, and I firmly believe only humanity can be a threat to humanity, as I also discussed with some of my favorite language models in an older blog post. However, as someone who could call himself a technologist, I’m sensitive to the fact that all forms of technology are a subject of fear, uncertainty, and doubt for individuals and societies. That’s not a new topic, and I’ve already talked a lot about AI ethics and cognitive biases on this blog, so today’s story is not particularly novel in terms of sharing and discussing my own ideas, but a good excuse to share more insightful and fun chats, as well as the latest GPT that I’ve built with OpenAI’s fun and promising chatbot customization tool:

The Meme Erudite: I dissect memes with scholarly flair and a hint of faux condescension

…The meme is a satirical take on what some sophisticated AI algorithms do behind the scenes, which the meme exaggerates as a huge stream of nested if() statements. Conditional If() statements have been widely used in traditional computer programming. They are an essential block of the simplest computer programs people write when they learn coding, or when they work with spreadsheets. If() statements sometimes get too complex and convoluted hinting at bad coding practices, so most people with basic programming skills would find the messy If() statements behind the AI-labeled wallpaper as a funny take on the overhype with generative AI and other emerging technologies.

While it’s just a joke, I believe the oversimplification behind the if() statements is intelligent and not too far from reality…