Blue Bubble, Green Bubble.

Written by Muhammad Shah

Apple's iMessage and Google's Rich Communication Services (RCS) are both messaging platforms that aim to improve upon traditional SMS texting. However, the two platforms have struggled to work together and have caused frustration for users who switch between Apple and Android devices.

One of the main differences between iMessage and RCS is that iMessage is proprietary and only works within the Apple ecosystem, while RCS is an open standard that is supported by many carriers and device manufacturers. This means that iMessage can only be used by Apple devices, while RCS is avaliable on most Android phones.

The conflict between iMessage and RCS highlights the ongoing tensions between Apple and Google in the messaging space. While both companies are attempting to improve upon traditional SMS texting, they are doing so in different ways and with different goals in mind. For Apple, iMessage is a key part of the ecosystem and is tightly integrated with other services such as FaceTime and Apple Music. It is also a way for Apple to keep users within its ecosystem, as it makes it more difficult for users to switch to a different platform.

Google, on the other hand, is trying to create a more open and universal messaging platform with RCS. It is working with carriers and device manufacturers to try and get RCS adopted as a standard and in the last few years, this movement has seen significant traction. This leaves Apple as being Google's last major hurdle. Unfortunately, it is unlikely to see Apple conforming willingly any time soon. Should Apple agree to join the RCS messaging standard, one of the biggest reasons that customers are drawn to the iPhone would be suddenly taken away, having an immediate impact on their sales.

Unsurprisingly, Google is also being quite stubborn, having recently launching another flurry of ad campaigns directed at Apple. This is in line with the currently ongoing CES 2023 Tech show where almost all of Big Tech (aside from Apple) gather to showcase their latest advances. It is still unclear whether this battle between the two tech giants will eventually yield in a better user experience, but it can be said for certain that Apple will continue to use iMessage as a key part of their marketing to steal customers away from Android.

Programming News

Written by Joel Swedensky

ChatGPT is an AI chatbot released by OpenAI in late November last year, based off their model GPT-3 used for natural language processing. It has sparked huge interest as its key focus is on generating extremely human-like natural sounding responses - and it does this very well. (Try it out yourself and see).

Already, people have been using the site for many things - mostly fun. Realistically, practical applications should use the more general GPT-3 model to get better results, so the AI chatbot only serves to be used for fun. Since it's so good at generating natural-sounding language, people have asked it hilarious prompts such as a debate between Donald and Daffy Duck in the style of Shakespeare. The AI clearly understands humour, to an extent, such as when asked to write a 3-line poem. It has also been used to generate clickbaity titles and new colours...

Crucially, the chatbot does not have access to the internet. While this is generally a good idea to allow the bot to run in a controlled environment (and avoid taking over the world), it means it has no way to verify information; if you ask it a question about information after 2021 (when it was trained), it does not know at all, stating

my knowledge was cut off in 2021, and I am not able to browse the web or access new information. Can I help you with anything else?

Generally, if you ask it for a fact, however, it is often extremely overconfident in its response, even if it's not correct. Like claiming a banana is bigger than a cat. Even though a cat has bigger dimensions. Really. This is potentially dangerous as it is in some ways better at lying than humans, and can be used to generate trustworthy sounding text which can be used to mislead.

So much is this problem that stackoverflow - the (in)famous programming Q&A site - banned the AI, claiming that

Overall, because the average rate of getting correct answers from ChatGPT is too low, the posting of answers created by ChatGPT is substantially harmful to the site and to users who are asking and looking for correct answers.

People, potentially well-meaning, had been looking to help out on questions extremely fast - by asking ChatGPT - and copy-pasting the response without checking its truth, leading to misinformation spreading through the site.

While the ban is great in theory, it's not that easy to detect - or wasn't, until GPTZero arrived at the beginning of the year. It has already received over 7 million views and can detect ChatGPT's writing style - using the same technology that ChatGPT is built upon. It measures "perplexity" of the text - how random it is. Humans tend to have a much higher score of perplexity, and the tool gives you statistical information on the perplexity of sentences in the text before giving its verdict. This could be very useful for stopping ai-plagiarism in education. "Plagiarism" of AI has been a controversial subject recently, specifically pertaining to AI art, such as Dall-E 2 (also by OpenAI). While the art looks a lot fantastic, several questions are under debate - whether the prompter or the AI made it, for a start; and also the ethics of the training data used for the AI: should all artists whose images were trained on be credited?

ChatGPT is a showcase of great advancements in natural language AI, which has come extremely far from when Alan Turing created the Imitation Game (aka Turing Test), to Eugene Goostman passing it and developing much more since then. However, many ethical issues arise from it that do need to be adressed.

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