It had to happen. When something reaches such a high degree of presence in the public conversation as artificial intelligence, opportunists emerge who, in one way or another, try to fool people with less information. Almost five months after the overwhelming appearance of ChatGPT, the president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, who has his own television program called Con Maduro – without a doubt, there is work there for psychoanalysts – introduced his own AI. His name is Sira, a curious coincidence with the popular Siri, Apple's virtual assistant.
Sira is the talking head of a young woman who speaks to the camera with the impersonal look that most computer-generated human beings still have and a syntax that has yet to be polished. Her first words were: “Greetings. Mr. President Nicolás Maduro, invited gentlemen and all of Venezuela. My name is Sira. I was created under the parameters of artificial intelligence to accompany him, starting today, in her program Con Maduro. I am very happy and honored to participate in this new space. We will triumph”. If you haven't seen the video yet, you can imagine Nicolás Maduro's overflow of self-satisfaction with that final "we will triumph" of his artificial creature.
Sira is nothing more than an animation with an artificial voice. It's not even necessarily an artificial intelligence. It is simply a recreation that tries to simulate that those (who) govern the South American country are at the forefront of the most decisive technology that will change the world in the coming years. After the brief self-introduction of the artificial announcer, Maduro justified his presence: "we have to be at the forefront of the new era in every way, in the sense of social ideas, political doctrine, the country project, of the geopolitical vision of the world, in the sense of science, technology, knowledge of innovations. Venezuela has to be ahead, we cannot be left behind”. Well, if it is true, apply it to education and health instead of putting it on a television program.
Everything is a comedy. Sira is a talking figure with a certain air of Max Headroom, the cult cyberpunk series of the 80s, but not a modern machine capable of answering real questions. We will probably see in future editions of the program Sira answering Maduro's proposals in an ingenious way. Don't be fooled. In a television program everything is part of a script. Nothing is left to the chance of an artificial intelligence capable of making mistakes. It is not for that, for the show, that this powerful and dangerous technology has been developed. It's not any joke.
