Why the Bard doesn't speak to me

When we hear the term ‘The Bard‘ our minds immediately spring to the name William Shakespeare. More specifically, Shakespeare is known as ‘The Bard of Avon‘. This is because he seems to have been given the title in recognition of his stature as ‘great poet’ and the unofficial national poet of England. It was only as the twentieth century advanced that he became inextricably identified with that title. Before that, the mind sprang to the name ‘Robert Burns‘, the Scottish poet. The Scots, proud of their national poet, would still argue that point as to who ‘The Bard’ actually is!

It turns out the new Bard in town is the large language model launched using LaMDA to compete with ChatGPT. LaMDA, which stands for?Language Model for Dialogue Applications, is a family of conversational?neural language models?developed by?Google

I'm not a Luddite. Even if I wanted to join the club, the kids wouldn't let me in.

For the past two decades, search engines have answered most users’ queries in the same way: with a ranked list of webpages. But Microsoft’s unveiling of its AI-powered Bing search engine this week suggests this period of stasis is over, tech critic Kevin Roose writes. Using natural language, a user can ask Bing to do tasks as diverse as planning a dinner party — it’ll serve up a menu with links to sources — to drafting a social media post or summarizing a financial report. “It’s an entirely new way of interacting with information on the internet,” Roose writes.

But here are some reasons why it's unlikely I'll use it much, that is, unless I must when it replaces Google search.

1. I don't have a lot of the problems it claims to solve
2. The switching costs are too high
3. It's likely to interfere with my productivity in the short run and I really want to do less, not more anyway. Haven't you heard about quiet quitting?
4. I don't like infringing on other people's intellectual property without their permission and I don't like them infringing on mine. If they want to use it they should pay me a licensing fee.
5. I'm tired of the ChatGPT tsunami on social media and this will just increase the force of the waves
6. Technofatigue
7. I need more high touch, not high tech, low trust
8. It is one more thing I must deal with when I teach
9. I don't like the idea that we'll now have to say, "just Bard it"
10. It will make it harder to keep all the lambdas straight
11. I have fun creating online content myself. I don't want to stop learning by doing it myself.
12. It doesn't seem to have much of a sense of humor. Try asking it to tell a joke.

Doctors have enough on their plate. LaMDA should Leave all Medical Doctors Alone already as we enter the trough of disillusionment.

Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA is the President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs