Last spring, during all the attention and hype artificial intelligence, I decided to try some of the various AI chatbots/programs/models: what were they like and how was the reasoning? Far from being a scientific test, I simply prompted and chatted “with” ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini and, during this spring, also Mistral. These programs (as I usually name them) have changed, mainly improved at performing tasks and my testing spans several versions from April 2024 to August 2025. My verdict so far is as follows:
ChatGPT (free and pro) – versatile, agile and rather good with words, although irregularly too brief. Doesn’t discern between public sources and whatever sources it can find, such as Reddit, even when asked to discern.
Copilot – too brief and short verbally. Also too restrained at thinking and unrealiable at producing texts. Searching and writing texts is faster when I do it.
Gemini (Flash and Pro) – Initially I used to to translate French academic texts into British academic texts. Translation was good. However, it constantly needed reminders on what and how to translate, about every fifth prompt. Otherwise it completely failed to grasp. (Thus I turned to DeepL instead.) Reasoning is improved and is far better than Copilot and Mistral at producing reliable texts on subjects, such as Donna Haraway’s cyborg or Jane Bennett’s material agency.
Mistral – very similar to Copilot.
Finally comes Claude (named after the information theorist Claude Elwood Shannon and as Casey Newton said on the Hard Fork podcast, if you’re gay and look at the logo, you cannot unsee it). It has since my testing it become my favourite, by far. Its capabilities to stitch together logical arguments are considerably better than the others, and the depth and reasoning is sometimes amazingly practical. Of course, it also reverts to “this is an interesting idea…” and concludes with the basic “this subject is evolving and shows complex…”. However, it can actually argue against me, and claim a subject is more complicated than I think, or, as I suggested I wanted to present a work meeting in Gen Alpha slang, argue this is a bad idea if my coworkers are older than me.
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