SINGAPORE — If you could have dinner with a key figure from history, who would it be? Now you can more or less live out that fantasy virtually, via a newly released artificial intelligence chatbot app allowing users to"chat" in text format with more than 20,000 famous people from times past.
“The first thing I saw in Singapore was a small fishing village located on the northeastern coast of the island. It was sparsely populated and largely untouched by European influence at the time,” answered the chatbot.“I first met the Temenggong Rahman, who was chief of the Johor-Riau Sultanate. He welcomed me to Singapore and signed a treaty with Britain which enabled us to establish a trading post there.
Great. Now we can fall asleep at night under the impression that Raffles’ favourite food was Indian curry, according to an AI chatbot. “Simply select the historical figure you want to chat with and start a conversation. You can learn about their life, their work, and their impact on the world in a fun and interactive way,” states the app’s description page.
However, the list includes some of the most abhorrent dictators who ever lived, including Adolf Hitler, a German leader who was responsible for heading an attempt to exterminate the Jewish race by systematically using purpose-built gas chambers to kill millions of those people and members of some other groups during World War II. The killing of about six million is known as"the Holocaust".