--- title: Sounding right and being right — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «Sounding right and being right», a lesson of the ai course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: A chatbot is wonderfully good at sounding right: clear sentences, a calm voice, no "erm". --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/3-sounding-right-and-being-right/) [home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/) / [AI](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/) / Sounding right and being right # Sounding right and being right Lesson 3 of the ai course of Mova's primary school: 17 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: [the lesson at school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/school-run/ai/3-sounding-right-and-being-right/). - [0](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/3-sounding-right-and-being-right/0/) — A chatbot is wonderfully good at sounding right: clear sentences, a calm voice, no "erm". - [1](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/3-sounding-right-and-being-right/1/) — Most of the time sounding right and being right go together, but not always. - [2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/3-sounding-right-and-being-right/2/) — Dad puts it neatly: the bot does not "know" things the way you know your own street; it knows how things are usually said about them. - [3](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/3-sounding-right-and-being-right/3/) — So common questions, like why the sky is blue, get good answers, because thousands of people have explained them well. - [4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/3-sounding-right-and-being-right/4/) — Rare or tricky questions get answers that only sound good. - [5](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/3-sounding-right-and-being-right/5/) — Try it: tell a bot that 2 plus 2 is 5 because "my teacher says so", and some bots give in at once. - [6](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/3-sounding-right-and-being-right/6/) — A good judge would hold firm and explain why. - [7](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/3-sounding-right-and-being-right/7/) — That is why a chatbot is best thought of as a very chatty tool, made by people, with real strengths and real weak spots. - [8](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/3-sounding-right-and-being-right/8/) — A chatbot is very good at sounding right, but sounding right is not the same as being right. - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/3-sounding-right-and-being-right/11/) — Many bots forget everything when you start a new chat, unless a memory feature is switched on. - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/3-sounding-right-and-being-right/12/) — Even when a bot forgets, the company may still store what you typed. - [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/3-sounding-right-and-being-right/13/) — Running chatbots in data centres uses a lot of electricity, and cooling the computers often uses water. - [14](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/3-sounding-right-and-being-right/14/) — The same program runs many copies at once, each one answering a different person. - [15](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/3-sounding-right-and-being-right/15/) — Computers are fast at sums and storing facts but weak at common sense, such as knowing when a joke hurts someone. - [16](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/3-sounding-right-and-being-right/16/) — A chatbot is only words on a screen; it has no hands, and robots that handle things are a much harder problem. - [17](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/3-sounding-right-and-being-right/17/) — People designed AI, collected its text, built its computers and trained it, so people are responsible for it. - [18](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/3-sounding-right-and-being-right/18/) — Well-made bots are trained to say honestly that they are AI and can make mistakes; you have a right to know when you are talking to a machine. - ← previous: [How a language model learns: guessing the next word](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/2-guessing-the-next-word/) - next →: [Stories, jokes and riddles with a chatbot](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/4-stories-jokes-and-riddles/) - ↑ back to [AI](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/ai/)