Did a Human or a Computer Write This?
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Did a Human or a Computer Write This?
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Re: Did a Human or a Computer Write This?
#2I got 7/10, but I think I would do better on prose with 3-4 sentences rather than a single one. Poetry is probably a bit tougher though.
I don't find computer-generated snippets that impressive--I mean, a lot of it is just pumping out variations or markov-generated mix-and-matches of things humans wrote in the first place. More impressive would be passing the Turing Test :D
Re: Did a Human or a Computer Write This?
#3For computer graphics, I have a standard that I use where instead of asking "Is this rendering technology 'realistic'?", as in, a binary question, I ask "At what resolution is this render indistinguishable from reality?" For instance, there's a lot of car photos and architecture renderings that use that use certain expensive rendering techniques that look great even at 720p, but you start getting into 1080p or above and it once again becomes clear it's a computer rendering. Other techniques may only be able to work up to 320x200 or something.
Similarly, telling whether a computer has written something or not is very challenging at this snippet size because there's hardly any room for "voice" to shine through. I actually did pretty well, but to be honest I got more mileage out of a meta-heuristic ("how is the author trying to fool me? ah, this one seems really, really human so it must be computer... yup...") than actual analysis of the text. I mean, drop those computer-generated sports sentences into the middle of a human sports column and you're not going to pick them out specially... they're facts. They fit. However, an entire column written like can be pretty obvious. I get some financial news from some Google Alerts on a couple of companies and it's incredibly obvious that there are computer algorithms out there that can take the daily outcome for a stock, how the market did that day, and how the entire industry did that day, and spin that into several hundred words of completely and utterly useless speculation about "why" the stock did a certain thing. (Not that it hasn't become clear to me just how shallow a lot of the "free" analysis is, but, well, in no way does outsourcing the shallow analysis job to a computer make it any better...!)
(One of them in particular that I've come to enjoy reading in an almost Dadaist sort of way really loves the phrase "The bears had a field day with..." as in, "The bears had a field day with $STOCK as it dropped 0.01% in light trading.")
Increase the sample size and you'd probably get a better sense of whether or not it is fooling you. I was going to write "and you might do better", but that's not necessarily true... for instance, to be honest I've never been "into" poetry, I've even tried seriously a couple of times, just can't do it, and I'm pretty sure the poetry-writing program could fool me for quite a few stanzas before I eventually caught on because, to me, it's all the same. [1] I'd eventually guess more on meta-analysis like observing grammatical structures being repeated for what would not be a good reason.
[1]: Have I caveated this sufficiently that nobody will feel compelled to reply and explain to me just how objectively awesome poetry is? I'd say my thing is more music, but to be honest, a surprising number of "human" composers already sound pretty computer-y to me....
Re: Did a Human or a Computer Write This?
#4I got 7/10, but I think I would do better on prose with 3-4 sentences rather than a single one. Poetry is probably a bit tougher though. I don't find computer-generated snippets that impressive--I mean, a lot of it is just pumping out variations or markov-generated mix-and-matches of things humans wrote in the first place. More impressive would be passing the Turing Test :D
I believe it's out of 8, so either you missed 3 and got 5/8 or you nailed it and got 7/8 :-)
I, for one, was wholly duped by the computers, with a 50% success rate.
Re: Did a Human or a Computer Write This?
#5[deleted]
Re: Did a Human or a Computer Write This?
#6I got 7/10, but I think I would do better on prose with 3-4 sentences rather than a single one. Poetry is probably a bit tougher though. I don't find computer-generated snippets that impressive--I mean, a lot of it is just pumping out variations or markov-generated mix-and-matches of things humans wrote in the first place. More impressive would be passing the Turing Test :D
I believe it's out of 8, so either you missed 3 and got 5/8 or you nailed it and got 7/8 :-) I, for one, was wholly duped by the computers, with a 50% success rate.
I got 6/8, but I had already heard of robots writing box-scores (more than one of the questions).
I was duped by the old english poetry, and also the novel which was dictating a human experience. I imagined it too difficult to write that for any current type of writing programs.
They need to get this technology into spam bots, pronto! http://xkcd.com/810/
Re: Did a Human or a Computer Write This?
#7What does "written by a computer" even mean?
I mean, computer-written can be anything from filling in some blanks to rendering a formula by reverse-parsing. And suppose that an apparently fancy formula actually results in blank-filling-in most of the time?
Lots of professional writers are described as following a formula. Lots of writers and non-writers construct text using word-processors and even an occasional search-and-replace.
-- Oh, and add to that "The Eliza Effect"[1], in which it's pretty easy for humans to ascribe greater meaning to some kinds of computer generated text than it really has.
Re: Did a Human or a Computer Write This?
#8[deleted]
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Re: Did a Human or a Computer Write This?
#9I missed 3. Some of these are getting pretty good but they probably chose the best examples. I'm guessing with a bit more context it would have been much easier to disambiguate.
Re: Did a Human or a Computer Write This?
#10What does "written by a computer" even mean? I mean, computer-written can be anything from filling in some blanks to rendering a formula by reverse-parsing. And suppose that an apparently fancy formula actually results in blank-filling-in most of the time? Lots of professional writers are described as following a formula. Lots of writers and non-writers construct text using word-processors and even an occasional sear…
It means what it means, the sentences were not composed by a human.
I used to work for a financial news website that started to make extensive use of this. Then management started using the phrase "talent cloud" an awful lot. Then my job started to suck, so I left. This is all about labor costs, of course.