A couple of days ago, I was doing the Wordle and at one point I wondered if there was a five-letter word in English that both started with, and ended with, the letter i.
I was about to Google it when I thought this might be a better question for AI. So I asked Microsoft’s Copilot. Here’s what it told me.
Well, that’s rather unimpressive.
So, how about ChatGPT?
Kudos for figuring out the Igloo is wrong, but why note it in the first place? And “imagi” is not an English word. And how could it not know that “India” is a wrong answer? (And as best as I can tell, iliwi isn’t a word).
I tried Siri, which just outsourced back to ChatGPT, which gave a different answer.
And, I guess, check unimportant information as well.
Grok actually came through, and with a word I knew from a Doctor Who audio drama, but I will confess that I had forgotten (and that I thought was a proper noun in any event).
Iceni is in the dictionary.
Eventually, I did go to Google. The best I could do was the following, as they were all in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary (I found them initially here).
- Imari is a kind of Japanese porcelain.
- Indri is a type of lemur.
- Issei is a Japanese immigrant, especially to the US.
The following were also suggested via the link above, but were not in the dictionary.
- Iambi is the plural of iambus (although these are words borrowed from Latin).
- Imshi is an Arabic word meaning “go away” used by some Australians as slang.
Dictionary.com has a list that includes iambi and imshi (and no others) as well.
One other list is found here, with Iraqi being the only new entry (the others being iambi, issei, and indri).
I was actually quite surprised that neither Copilot nor ChapGPT (twice!) did worse than I did via a simple bit of googling. Worse, that they both gave wrong answers as correct ones.
Kudos to Grok for finding iceni, which I did not find in my googling. But I found a few others that Grok didn’t.
I would not suggest that this is a some massively conclusive test of AI, but it does underscore that maybe having some basic research skills and discernment still matters.
I mean, can you imagine if someone thought they could use a chatbot to formulate something like tariff policy? Just whacky!
