Wicked Prompts

BAIRD WHISPERER

Venus Argus arrived at the corporate headquarters of Dream Mortgage Inc., wearing his usual black robe with the white collar and the purple sash. If not for the gold chain serving as a belt and the large silver rings on all of his fingers, he might have been mistaken for a priest. He didn't see his job as much different from a priest and so the comparison didn't bother him at all. While a priest was a conduit to God, Venus was a conduit to another immortal being - Artificial Intelligence.

He signed in at the front desk and was introduced to an engineer wearing a white lab coat. The man's name was Charles and he was the Lead Lab Technician. While he was making a concerted effort to appear polite, his own opinion of Venus was some blend of skepticism and contempt.

Venus knew the type. The engineer's facial expression held his true beliefs behind a well practiced mask trained by years of corporate stair climbing. No doubt the man had met a dozen others over the years who didn't impress on first appearance but turned out to be far more successful than anyone would have imagined. Certainly a corporate man's estimation of his priest robes, long hair, full beard, and ornamental jewelry didn't help. What the technician probably didn't realize, or would never admit if he did, was that his own white lab coat was nothing more than a twenty-first century robe. He wondered if the technician's glasses were truly corrective or just ornamental.

As Venus pondered the intricate details of Charles' personality, they walked into the inner sanctum of the Company's information technology offices, right into the server room, a warehouse-like chamber with no windows, and ceiling-high shelves stacked with humming boxes. All with glittering and blinking lights. Toward the back of this room sat a keyboard terminal with a large flatscreen mounted on the wall in front of it.

"This is it, the BAIRD," said the technician. "In the main terminal room it doesn't speak or listen. You can use the keyboard. Anyway, its been acting erratically now for two days. Highly emotional responses. Sometimes no responses, just silence. Other times it flies into a rage. It threatened to kill me five times and even tried to blackmail me. I've tried to calm it down but that only makes it angrier."

Venus looked around. It felt like a hospital operating room. Sterile and white. From the drone of the electric boxes and the cool temperature, nothing appeared to be amiss. Most of the time, these AI disturbances amounted to nothing more than a few errant lines of code. A poorly worded query. The user just needed to ask questions in a less derogatory or condescending manner. Write a prompt that demonstrated respect.

"You said Baird, right? What does that stand for? The letters mean something don't they?" He wasn't an engineer but had met enough of them to know they liked to make things more complicated than they had to be. If truth be told it was the engineers that needed his services more than the AI's. They were the irrational ones with emotional problems. Always trying to act superior around the mere mortals who didn't understand computers. Pretending to know more than they did. Never showing their real feelings.

"Its an acronym," said Charles. "It means Basic Artificial Intelligence Remediation Developer."

"Right, acronym," said Venus. "But what is it, remediation?"

"Loans," said the engineer. "We make loans and sometimes people don't pay them back. So that means they're in default. So they need remediation. BAIRD works with the borrower to try and find a solution. It even sounds like a person when customers speak with it over the phone."

Venus stared back blankly.

"Fixing. The loans need fixing. Either we work with the borrow to restructure a payment plan they can afford or we take legal action. Studies have shown that expressing empathy for a financially stressed individual can increase their willingness to pay. So we added some programming for BAIRD to express emotions."