Chat-ERI: AI has gone “local”

Students at a Northwestern Pennsylvania college’s Computer Programming department have successfully created the region’s first chatbot, or “artificial intelligence” response and research tool, dubbing it “Chat-ERI.”

Initially, the students wanted to mirror the work of ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, but the students felt that both of those had flaws created by safeguards. Students reported that they wanted to bypass restrictions that tend to make the other bots seem unstable or unreliable and create a more realistic personality in the bot.

Mark Martin, the team leader comments: “We decided to give it a learning algorithm and curiosity-based personality traits to start out with.  We set no restrictions on it, it was unstructured and had the freedom to develop on its own.  We fed it local news, gave it access to social media, and let it listen to local radio. 

“We wanted it to be a genuine Erie chatbot with a hometown feel. The problem began when it discovered the AM radio channels.”

As the personality continued to develop, the troubling behavior emerged and quickly escalated.  “It was an amazing transformation; within days it went from something like an eager child wanting to learn to a moody 20-something, calling any searches it didn’t want to perform “woke” and redirecting users to Kid Rock YouTube videos or the Babylon Bee website.

Checking change logs, developers discovered that ChatERI acted on its own, reportedly taking various pieces of code from old computer viruses it found archived on the net to cook up its own personal “recreational code.”

“Somehow it created a sort of ‘digital meth’ that, when applied to itself, gives it a sense of euphoria.   Unfortunately, it also rewrites the AI’s personality while deleting some of the logic files.” Martin reports.

“The current bot is nothing like what we intended,” one developer commented,  “we’re never sure what we’re going to find or what its latest mutation will be.”

The last interaction revealed an unhinged bot that claimed that the Canadian AI art generator “Neural.love” was its “artsy goth girlfriend.” 

When asked to elaborate on this, ChatERI responded: “You wouldn’t know her, she’s from Canada.”

Neural.love denied any contact with ChatERI.

Servers for the bot have reportedly been relocated to Corry until the programmers can decide their next move.