Nobody but a robot could love Henry Kissinger
Elmsford, N.Y.: Waiting for the first AI-generated letter to appear in the Daily News, I may have spotted it on Dec. 23. Headlined “Historical figure,” Voicer Steven Hawkins’s tribute to Henry Kissinger read like it was created by a ninth-grader using an early, flawed version of ChatGPT. The sentence structure was childlike. The content was limited to textbook highlights of the career of the man who inspired nuke-loving “Dr. Strangelove” — with no mention of the many controversies surrounding him.
But the real giveaway was the clueless sentence, “Stars in Hollywood such as Ed Sullivan, Dick Clark and Johnny Carson praised his efforts through the years.” By no stretch of the imagination could any of these have been considered movie stars. Sullivan was best known for his long-running column in the Daily News and his CBS TV variety show broadcast from Broadway. Clark grew up in Westchester, and while his “Bandstand” teen music TV show may have migrated from Philly to Los Angeles, in his later years Clark’s name was synonymous with New Year’s Eve in Times Square. As for Johnny Carson, the Iowa-born TV game and talk show host may have bounced back and forth between NYC and LA, but this essentially Midwest nice guy would have praised Attila the Hun to get him as a guest. And who would consider any of these show biz greats a foreign policy expert?
A human-written Kissinger ode might have cited his Hollywood appeal as a movie-star magnet dating the likes of Raquel Welch, Jill St. John and Shirley MacLaine, though none of them would have qualified as diplomatic scholars, either.
Steve Ditlea