In my very first article on Mirror, I decided to participate in the AI GameFest - Designer Challenge on Carv.io, a platform that longs for a self-sovereign identity (SSI) oracle and incentivized data-sharing protocol. This empowers the user to share the value captured from the utility of data in a content-based and privacy-preserving mechanism. In other words, earn soul points from sharing your data. Whether this will work or be a long-lasting project is still to be confirmed by time.
https://carv.io/events/55ad40d8-3229-5410-b5be-9994cab9b196/detail
Earning some of the gems or other prizes that Carv.io offers for solving these events can range from simple tasks like clicking on Twitter here and adding some Discord there, up to involving quests like the aforementioned AI GameFest - Designer Challenge. It is one of three challenges that asks for an AI-generated text on the topic “brave knight saves the princess from the evil dragon.” Yes, that’s a pretty boring topic, merely packed into 500 words. But don’t get me wrong, asking an AI to write 500 words about a knight, a princess, and an evil dragon is a pretty hard task to solve. Guess why? Let’s dive into it.
Using Copilot
Due to my okayish experience with Copilot over the past weeks, I decided to get this task done there. The good part is you can decide whether Copilot should be more creative with his answer or strict. I chose creative because I wanted to have a nice story not bound to the realms of reality. With a little tweak, I asked Copilot to do his magic and he did. He gave me a neat little story but it fell short of 500 words. So much so that I decided to delve into it and asked for more words, deepening the backgrounds and stuff. I did this for about 10 minutes. Then I decided the text was pretty much done and could be released. But a check in Word revealed to me that this hadn’t been 500 words. It had been 662 words. So I asked Copilot to shorten it and he fell short. Instead of landing in the asked range of 480-500 words, he gave me 312 words back. I realized asking a creative AI for doing exact tasks might be a little ambitious and I switched over to the precise Copilot and asked him to give me the text in 500 words and he tried. At the end of the text, he wrote 499 words but it had been 345. And I tried further but it seemed like writing and counting words was not the strength of the AI. This task ended up with Copilot writing me 250 words and apologizing for being short in words and demanded to give him more story depths and details of what should happen in the story to give me an exact measure.
So I found out
Finally, after a grueling 1.5 hours of arguing with an AI (yes, you read that right), I took the 665-word essay it spat out and mercilessly chopped off 167 words. All this for a yawn-inducing knight/princess/dragon story that had to fit into an exact word count. Talk about a wild Friday night! In the end, the AI didn’t even try to lie to me and bluntly told me that I should write my 500 words on my own and not give it such an unsolvable task. So I learned that AIs are not only lying when asked to present solutions that don’t fit the request, but they also are not able to realize that counting words is a damn hard thing to do. I found myself reminiscing about my student days, feeling a surge of pride. I mean, I never got penalized for miscounting my words, a task that Word has been my trusty sidekick for, both then and now. Take that, AI! So is Word then the better AI? At least it told me that every tool has its tasks and its shortcomings. I, for myself, won’t ask any AI in the upcoming years to count my words again. Who knew that counting words could be as challenging as rocket science?
(This text has been corrected by an AI and I took some suggestions for a better readability - no one should say AIs don’t get a chance)