Ironically I used a grammar bot to help rewrite my chatbot explainer for a 6th grade reading level, which for better or for worse is the level at which 60% of US citizens read at or under. A difficult truth.
Imagine you're an alien from outer space. You don’t speak any human languages, but you’ve spent hundreds of years listening to radio signals from Earth with your supercomputer. When you finally arrive and meet your first humans, your computer tries to guess the right words to say. It thinks saying “we are here to serve mankind” is a friendly greeting, but it doesn’t know that this could also mean cooking and eating people. Things get pretty crazy after that.
That’s kind of what a chatbot is like. A chatbot is a computer program that puts words together to make sentences that sound real. It does this by guessing which words usually go together. It can do that because it has studied tons of writing from people — books, websites, and more.
But sometimes it guesses wrong. And when it does, even if the sentence sounds okay, it might be totally wrong.
If you ask a chatbot about Ben Franklin, it will probably tell you the right stuff, like that he was a famous inventor and helped start the United States. But because it’s just guessing what to say next, it might suddenly tell you something totally false, like that he was on a TV show or started a chain of discount stores.
The truth is, chatbots don’t really “know” anything. They don’t think like people do. They just read what you type and send back a sentence that seems like the right one to say. Not always the truth — just a reply.