Holiday Adventures with an AI Chatbot

So in my continuing experiments with artificial intelligence, I decided to ask Claude, the chatbot created by AI startup Anthropic, to help me with some holiday gift-giving, specifically for my wife.

I highlighted some of her interests, including her newfound love for pickleball as well as her longtime love – reading. Claude offered up that I should consider buying her a book about pickleball strategy.

Great idea! I thought, and asked,

Is there a book on pickleball strategy that is considered better than others?

Claude then gave me a list of books, with titles, authors and descriptions. It was awesome …

Until I went to Amazon and looked for  The Art of Pickleball, Pickleball Psychology and Winning Pickleball by author and came up empty. There were some that were close, but zero matches.

So I went back to Claude and here is our exchange.

Which leaves me asking, what the heck?!?!?

As background, I used Claude because the founder of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, is a former OpenAI employee who left over differences with leadership and has been at the forefront of something called Constitutional AI, which sets out to make safer systems by placing hard and fast rules on what the AI can and can’t do.

I appreciate Claude’s apology but the explanation leaves me flabbergasted and unsettled. It makes it sound as if it answered in total ignorance, but some of the authors do exist, and have even written about pickleball – they just haven’t written the book Claude said they did. How in the world could I receive with confidence Claude’s answer if something really mattered. Should I try to tourniquet a serious injury to my son’s right arm and drive to the hospital or call for an ambulance? Do I always have to ask it if it’s on the up and up?

It’s hard to take AI seriously when it’s fundamentally unserious — when even its most philanthropic executions are deceptive and ignorant. Maybe it’s best to just keep asking it to write stories about peppers in the style of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, or create an image for this post.

 But what about ChatGPT?

As a followup, I tried ChatGPT with the same query. It considered, then let me know it was asking Bing search for “best pickleball strategy books” then gave me five recommendations, which actually exist (though with one, it got the subtitle confused with the title). Points to ChatGPT.