Berlin | The satirical website unleashes sarcastic chatbots on users

BERLIN (AP) — Satirical site “Der Postillion” takes on the current hype of chatbots with a program that delivers snappy or silly answers.

The filmmakers praise “DeppGPT” as “the first real AI human language”: “Let yourself squirm, laugh at it and put you as you are used to on real people.” Many find pleasure in the bad way — after posting at the start of the week, the number of interactions moved toward half a million, according to Editor-in-Chief Stefan Secherheitmann.

Answers from “DeppGPT” for real-world questions are definitely not helpful. When asked who the advisor is at the moment, the program can answer that, for example, it is Elmo from Sesame Street or a “huge pretzel” from Bavaria. “DeppGPT” isn’t exactly polite either. If you ask how you can improve your appearance, the answer could be: “Oh, that’s hard. Well, first of all, you can also put a bag on your head.”

Since the end of last year, the chatbot ChatGPT from startup OpenAI has caused a stir because it can communicate on a human level. The program is trained on this with a huge amount of data. She forms sentences by estimating word by word how the sentence can go. A disadvantage of this principle is that the program does not understand the content: for this reason it can also output completely false information in the conviction. Postillon takes this to an extreme with its chatbot.

Manual retraining was not necessary.

In its work, «DeppGPT» uses the technology behind ChatGPT via a paid interface. Postillon uses additional instructions for the behavior of responding to user questions in order to receive bad or meaningless feedback from the interface. The Standard Model sufficed, “Manual retraining was not necessary,” Sicherman explained. “In principle, the AI ​​decides what to answer based on the character we create.”

Sichermann did not provide any information on the costs of using the interface. But “postillon” can easily afford it.

Usually after three questions, “DeppGPT” will break the conversation and the page must be reloaded. OpenAI previously provided such a stop as a precaution to prevent ChatGPT from drifting towards silly responses. According to personality DeppGPT, Postillon lets users know it must be their fault: “Think about it. Even the machine won’t talk to you!”