Transport Malta customer care

On March 5, the day of the National Protest against Corruption in Valletta, a No. 52 public bus driver en route to Valletta deemed it fit not to pick people up from several bus stops, just before the protest had to start. 

The bus was definitely not full up. I experienced this myself, with six others that were on the same bus stop and heard the same complaints from other commuters on the next bus.

Since then, I reported the matter by email to Transport Malta four times, explaining in more detail what happened and giving them many relevant details including my telephone number. An automatic reply saying someone from their team will get back to me “shortly” was always sent.

Only once (March 21) did they reply that the matter is being handled and asked me to wait a while longer. I also called their customer care line five times since March 6, again being told each and every time that they will pass on my report and that someone will call me back soon. No one ever did – over seven weeks after my first reports.

Should this be considered acceptable? I can provide Transport Malta with all the dates of my emails and also the dates, times and names of all my calls to customer care.

MONICA CILIA – Balzan

Slippery path at St Julian’s

I recently fell while walking close to the LOVE monument in St Julian’s as the path was and still is very slippery.

Due to this fall, I had to have an urgent operation on my left-hand fingers which, of course, was a great inconvenience and I still have not fully recovered.

On March 21, I emailed the St Julian’s local council requesting immediate action to prevent people from slipping on the pathway. So far nothing has been done. 

If the council cannot afford to do anything due to financial reasons, it should at least put up a sign indicating that the path is slippery.  Since it is common for the council not to acknowledge emails, I made a similar request to its legal advisers but, once again, nothing was done.

Hopefully, as a result of this letter, action will be taken.

ADRIAN MIFSUD – Swieqi

‘Meet Xandru Borg’

ChatGPT is a Natural Language Processing (NLP) system.

I refer to the article ‘Meet Xandru Borg, a social reformer invented by ChatGPT’ (April 23), which highlights the factual inaccuracies and fabrications in responses given by AI.

There seems to be a common misunderstanding about the scope of ChatGPT. This is a Natural Language Processing (NLP) system, intended to understand the content and context of human language, process it and then generate text that simulates human speech.

At present, the factual accuracy of the content it generates thus falls completely outside the scope of such a model and, indeed, the developers never claimed otherwise. Evaluating ChatGPT on such a parameter would hence be using the wrong yardstick. The big hype around ChatGPT comes from the fact that this was the first technology to be able to process human language in such an effective and impressive manner, producing text that, content apart, is practically indistinguishable from that written by a human with a good level of language proficiency.

Nevertheless, connecting NLPs to factual content, likely from search engines, will be the next step forward, hopefully in the not so distant future.

We should not judge a car by its (lack of) ability to fly but, rather,  appreciate the beauty of its engine and the revolutionary progress it brought about; while we also dream of the day when a pair of wings are added onto the car, modifying it into a plane.

SAMUEL MEILAK – Baħar iċ-Ċagħaq