If you build it, they will come… maybe

Let me start by apologizing to all the editors whose deadlines I have blown, the friends whose texts I have been ignoring, the writers of all the newsletters I subscribe to that have gone unread, the Fedex/UPS drivers whose packagers have been piling up unopened on my porch, and to my cat, whose bowl has been empty for at least two hours and is now looking at me like I might be a reasonable substitute for lunch. 

I've been sucked into Poe, a marketplace of official and unofficial AI chatbots. [1] Poe is one-stop-shopping for geeks who want to compare how bots like Claude 3 and GPT 4 respond to the same prompts, or what image-generation engines like Dall-E-3 and Stable Diffusion will produce when asked to draw the same picture. 

Poe offers access to a few dozen of the nerdiest large language models (LLMs) in the world, many of which even I, an alleged AI maven, have not heard of. Some offer a certain number of prompts you can submit for free, others require you to pony up for a subscription before they show you just how goddamned smart they are.

But what's more interesting to me is that Poe allows you to build your own chatbot using some of these LLMs as its core, then offer them to the world and even make some money doing it. [2] There are now a few hundred of these bots on Poe, all created by presumably normal humans, and some of the more useful ones have thousands of monthly users. 

This is not to say all of these chatbots are actually useful, good, or worth paying for. But they're fun to play with, especially if one is inclined to avoid deadlines, packages, friends, and one increasingly ravenous feline. 

Bot's all, folks

For example, if you're in the mood for a little light debasement before beginning your workday, you can dial up the Insult Queen. She will happily crush any remaining shards of self worth you may still be clinging to.

According to the insult queen, I am a pathetic excuse for a human being who's so repulsive even a blind person would not want to touch me, and that my general body odor rivals a landfill. (I'm summarizing here.) That sounds about right.

On the other hand, when I asked the DarkestHumour bot to tell me a joke, here's what it came up with, along with my responses.

Did I mention that not all of these bots are worth paying for? 

I asked the EmojiArtist bot to create an emoji using the prompt "Writer." Here's what she (it uses a female avatar — don't @ me) came up with:

To my mind, this looks less like what comes to mind when I think of "writer" and more like a hipster douchebag who's a little too enamored of yacht rock. And when I asked her/it to create a douchebag emoji, she went completely surreal on me:

Are those Mr. Potato Heads? Is this a Rene Magritte hallucination after eating too many boiled peanuts? Your guesses are as good as mine.

Build-a-Bot

Naturally, I couldn't resist getting into the game myself. I created CrankyDanBot, based on Anthropic's Claude chatbot. One of the cool things about Poe's bot creation tool is that you can give your bot specific instructions on the tone and attitude you want it to convey. You can also suggest additional knowledge bases it can draw upon for answers, as well as the "temperature" (level of creative license) for each response.

I told my bot to respond to messages using sarcasm, skepticism, and cautionary irreverence, and to not shy away from awful puns or off-color jokes. My additional knowledge sources include Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary [3], the Encyclopedia of Information Science and Technology (4th edition), and excerpts from Groucho Marx's 1959 memoir, Groucho and me. I also set the creativity temp to 98 degrees. 

Overall, I'd say my initial attempt was just OK. The answers vacillated between sardonic 19th century eloquence (Bierce) and trying too hard to be jocular and witty. [4] If I had to do it over (or could figure out how to edit my existing bot — that process is a mystery to me) I'd add a broader range of knowledge bases. 

But when I asked CrankyDanBot about its author, it did a not-terrible job of capturing my essence (except for the bits about turtles — that's also a mystery to me). 

There's a lot more to say about Poe, which I'll leave for a future date. But I'll end with a poem from Claude-3-Haiku about a writer who's always blowing deadlines:

Pen in hand, mind blank
Deadlines loom, yet words won't come
Procrastination.

Can't improve on that. 

What kind of bot would you build? Share your inspiration in the comments below or email me: [email protected].

[1] Poe is the brainchild of the folks behind Quora, a question and answer site where I have spent far too much time in an effort to avoid doing real work. So, for me, Poe is really an extension of my natural inclination towards procrastination. 

[2] Build-a-bot is not original to Poe — OpenAI has been offering this feature for at least six months — but most of the others restrict you to a single LLM as the basis. 

[3] Originally launched in 1881 as a randomly published newsletter, then compiled into a tome in 1906 with the title, The Cynic's Word Book. 

[4] Been there, done that.