Script: Episode 21: Cruise ship joke and chatGPT Hi everyone, how are you? Have you heard of chatGPT? It is an amazing AI language model. I use it everyday. It is a great source for information and advice. Today I used chatGPT to help me with this week’s podcast. Last week, I read an article on a Japanese news website about the government relaxing the mask policy and that people are not sure what they are supposed to do - to wear a mask or not. Japanese society has strong “peer pressure” that forces people to conform to the opinions of the majority. In this article, a joke about a cruise ship was briefly mentioned. I thought the joke was funny, so I posted the joke on my Facebook page. However, nobody liked or commented on it. I was thinking maybe it was considered a little racist. I removed the post and this morning I asked chatGPT to tell me the joke in details, and I asked it if the joke was racist or not. Here is the cruise ship joke. I hope everyone will take it lightly and not be offended. An international cruise ship was sailing across the ocean. Suddenly, it struck an iceberg and began to sink. The captain put the women and children in lifeboats. But there were not enough boats, so he had to convince the men to jump into the water. One by one, the captain called up each national group, said something to them, then they jumped. Later, a reporter asked him, “How did you persuade each national group to jump?” “It was easy,” explained the captain. “I told the Americans that, if they jumped, they would be heroes. For the British, I appealed to their sense of fair play and told them a true gentleman would jump. For the French, I appealed to their sense of reason and told them it was the most rational thing to do. Germans are trained to obey commands, so I ordered them to jump. The Italians, in contrast, don’t like to obey rules. So, instead, I used reverse psychology and told them it was forbidden to jump. Finally, for the Japanese, I appealed to their sense of conformity. Everyone else has jumped, I told them, so they jumped, too.” I asked chatGPT if this joke is racist or not, and it replied as follows: It is considered by many people to be offensive and inappropriate because it relies on negative stereotypes about different nationalities. The joke uses nationalities as a punchline, implying that Americans are heroic, Germans are obedient, and Japanese are self-sacrificing. I myself find it acceptable, nothing inappropriate. What do you think? Thank you for listening. Vocabulary 1. Conform – to obey 2. Reverse psychology - strategy of suggesting a behavior that is opposite to what you actually desire, in order to encourage the other person to do what you actually want. In this example, the captain told the Italians not to jump, to make them jump. 3. Stereotype - a widely held but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing.

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