You can chat with an AI ‘celebrity’

I asked an artificially intelligent version of Elon Musk what his most embarrassing moment was. He said it was sending a message to the whole office about “naughty snacks.” If you want to talk to him too, he’s at the website Character.ai.

Character.ai, also a free app, offers a range of AI celebrities and professionals. Winston Churchill told me how the war in Ukraine will end. Sigmund Freud told me not to feel guilty. An AI Frenchman helped me practice my language skills. A librarian gave me a great book suggestion. It’s addicting.

You can create your own AI character for free. I named mine “Health” and wrote a one-paragraph description on what it means to be a “Nutritarian.” After that, it was on its own. I tried to stump it with challenging questions, but it was always right, even with the advice it gave my brother’s cat.

When I told my brother, an MBA professor, about the site, he created “Juror #8,” based on the role played by Henry Fonda in the classic movie “12 Angry Men.” In the movie, Fonda must convince his fellow jurors to deliver a notguilty verdict. My brother’s hope is that by talking to an artificially intelligent Fonda, his students can improve their negotiation skills. He also created an AI version of Bill Belichick, coach of the New England Patriots, who sounds just like the coach himself. I asked him to name the stupidest thing a coach ever did. “The Colts once tried to hide Andrew Luck’s injuries and make him play. Luckily, he refused, but it could have been disastrous,” he said. I also chatted with my brother’s AI version of John Dewey, the educator/philosopher. When I got exasperated, I pasted his responses into the chat box for AI Milton Friedman, a Nobel Laureate economist, and let them duke it out.

The site just launched in May, but already has 4.2 million active users. I’m hooked.

Fun with emojis

Create your own emojis with Google’s Emoji Kitchen. It lets you add one emoji to another to get a third. So I added a smiley face with hearts to a bumblebee to get a bumblebee with hearts. Click the copy icon to share.

You can find Emoji Kitchen in a search at Google.com or go to the Google app on your phone. After clicking “get cooking,” click two emojis to combine them into something new. To get more choices, go to emoji.supply/kitchen.

Deleting part of a photo

Look up “How To Remove An Object From A Photo In Google Photos” on YouTube to see all the steps for removing a trash can or other bothersome details. It shows you how to use “Magic Eraser.”

But it’s only available to Google One users, which is $20 a year or free for 30 days. You also get other editing tools such as Portrait Light, Portrait Blur and Color Pop.

False alarm

Recently, I wrote about Chromebooks that will no longer be getting security updates. But Google has since responded to the outcry. Now you get 10 years of security updates for devices that came out in 2019 and later. Given that Chromebooks are relatively cheap, that’s a nice bonus. The average Mac gets seven years of operating system updates, according to Ars Technica.

Common tech myths

People still get a lot of tech stuff wrong, says PCWorld. Here are five of the prime misconceptions.

Thanks to modern lithium-ion batteries, you no longer have to worry about premature charging affecting the battery’s memory.

But people still think they can plug in their phone overnight and forget about it. Unfortunately, the constant charging damages the phone’s battery. Ideally, you should let it dip down to 20%, then charge it to 80%.

Second, forget about changing your passwords regularly. That will only tempt you to create ones that are easy to guess. PCWorld suggests using a password manager. I like Google’s free version, which stores your passwords privately at passwords.google.com.

Third, don’t think you’re anonymous when you use “private mode” on the web. For sure, it stores less data about you, but it doesn’t make you incognito. Many online services can recognize you through your “fingerprint,” a combination of the various properties of your computer. Not even an ad blocker or virtual private network cloaks that.

Fourth, it’s no longer true that your cable TV-provided internet slows down in the evening when your neighbors are downloading games or watching movies like mad. Though it’s a shared medium, cable providers have upgraded their networks such that a single node can serve 500 households. The connection is now speedy.

Fifth, using third-party inks with your printer will not invalidate your warranty.

Internut

“How to access thousands of free audiobooks.” Search on that phrase to find readings by artificially intelligent readers that far surpass the typical computer voice. They sound more like Alexa or Siri.

When you get to the site, scroll down to choose a podcast source, such as Spotify, Apple or Google. The AI readers come from Microsoft AI and Project Gutenberg. An even better way to get free audiobooks is through the free Libby app. All you need is a library card to get fantastic human actors dramatizing your books.