Boju Bajai vs ChatJPT
Still waiting for AI chatbots' “genius level intelligence” to make our life easy.
Welcome to Cold Takes by Boju Bajai, especially to all our new subscribers. Thank you for choosing to have us in your inbox 🙂
In this newsletter, we bring you a round-up of news and feminist views from Nepal and the Nepali internet.
New to Boju Bajai? Hi, we are the OG grannies of Nepali podcasts. After all, we’ve been around since KP Oli’s first stint as prime minister, when he was just 62! Very young by Nepali netas’ standards hai ;)
And please check out our podcasts and videos.
There’ve been a lot of hot takes, cold takes, panic inducing takes and everything in between about how AI is coming for our jobs and changing the face of [insert whatever you industry you work in] and how consequential the technology is going to be for all aspects of human life.
Sam Altman of Open AI recently gushed in an interview that people have been calling his company’s advanced AI models “genius level intelligence”. So for our birthday episode, we decided to put ChatGPT and DeepSeek to work. Because frankly, after nine years of producing content across different mediums, we were pretty confident that these genius AI tools, which claim to “execute tasks on humans’ behalf” had sufficient Boju Bajai content to scrape off the internet and train their chatbots. All we had to do was master the art of prompt writing and we’d have this newsletter and our podcast episodes ready in no time.
Finally, the machine has become sophisticated enough to allow your ageing boju bajais to enjoy leisurely weekends to relax, rejuvenate and recharge.
Or so we thought!
We started with a straightforward prompt: “Tell me something about Boju Bajai podcast.”
While ChatGPT correctly identified our “wit, humour and sharp commentary”, and also included that Boju Bajai translates to grandmother in Nepali, it got a key detail grossly wrong.
According to ChatGPT, Boju Bajai is “hosted by Sajag Rana and Pranaya Rana”.
“Puhleez, who are these bajeys, bewakoof ChatGPT?” I almost retorted to its JPT replies.
But then I remembered that using "please" and "thank you" in ChatGPT queries costs "millions of dollars" in electric bills. So I moved onto DeepSeek to test if our Chinese mama haruko brilliant product making waves would do a better job at making our lives easier.
This time the prompt was detailed since it’s our birthday month.
Write a birthday special edition of the newsletter "Cold Takes by Boju Bajai" to mark the podcast's ninth year. Highlight the awards and accolades Boju Bajai has won since 2016 and also link it to politics and women's rights in Nepal.
And let’s just say that Deepseek spat out a bunch of hilarious and outright false responses. This is what experts call ‘AI hallucinations’ – responses which contain false, misleading, and made-up information presented as factually accurate.
DeepSeek’s responses had several made-up accolades (2018 National Podcast Award?), wildly imaginative “viral episodes” (The Great Nepal Electricity Heist: Load-Shedding Lies" – Exposing the farce behind endless power cuts) and generic (but glowing) reviews of Boju Bajai.
The sad funny part was DeepSeek confusing Boju Bajai podcast with other bro-ey podcasts from Nepal. And guess who DeepSeek thinks is the host of Boju Bajai? None other than Sisan Baniya, everybody’s favorite bro on the Nepali internet. All that hard work to produce feminist content since 2016 only to see “genius AI chatbots” credit them to a podcaster/boxing enthusiast bro!
So much for AI reducing our workload and making our lives easy!
Anyway, here’s our latest Cold Takes - birthday edition episode that we produced with zero help from nalayak AI. In this rambling birthday celebratory conversation, we look back on our journey, vent frustration about how the Nepali state continues to treat Nepali women as second-class citizens, the recent corruption kandas, "Paras Sarkar" content farm, and why Nepali netizens still can’t pachao opinionated women like actor Suraksha Pant.
(Spotify’s over janney auto generated podcast chapters got confused about the section on “Paras Sarkar” and listed it as “Paris Hilton” instead. Kya baat, in machines we trust!)
Hope you enjoy our birthday episode.
Also, plugging our new series “Rewind with Boju Bajai”, where we talk about all things nostalgia. We began this series as an attempt to document the pop culture, media and society of 90’s Nepal because we couldn’t find a lot of information online about that era. We hope this series will contribute in some ways to increase the digital footprints of our childhood and teenage years, which will one day be scrapped by “genius” AI models and help reduce further “AI hallucinations.”
The first video in the series explores the origin story of Wave magazine. Please check it out on Boju Bajai’s YouTube channel.
Our second video in the same series features Sukmit Gurung, Nepal’s OG pop music icon.
The third video features writer Anbika Giri and computer scientist Dr. Dovan Rai. They talk about their time growing in the not-so-Royal Nepal of the 90s, their formative experiences during the years of political upheaval in Nepal, from Panchayat rule to multi-party democracy, followed by the Maoist insurgency, King Gyanendra’s direct rule to Nepal’s historic transition to a federal republic.
And finally, thank you for sticking around and being part of our laugh and guff gaff since 2016. We’ve actually become boju bajais in podcast years 🙂
Until the next issue, which we hope will be fully AI generated!
lol