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Did a Human or a Computer Write This?

nytimes.com

31–40 of 80 posts

Re: Did a Human or a Computer Write This?

#33
Completely meaningless. "Written by a computer" doesn't really mean anything. What's important it's the breadth and variety of the content an algorithm can generate, its ability to choose the most relevant among its input data, and the amount of meaningless content that has to be discarded by a human supervisor before publishing.

Take fragment 6: “Tuesday was a great day for W. Roberts, as the junior pitcher threw a perfect game to carry Virginia to a 2-0 victory over George Washington at Davenport Field.”

Cool. And who told the computer it was a great day for him? Who told the computer he was playing? Who told it his game was "perfect"? This sentence can be written by a professional human journalist in about ten seconds, how long does it take to input in a computer the data that make up the story or to check among hundreds of possible variations for one that doesn't contain obvious mistakes?

Or: “Kitty couldn’t fall asleep for a long time. Her nerves were strained as two tight strings, and even a glass of hot wine, that Vronsky made her drink, did not help her. Lying in bed she kept going over and over that monstrous scene at the meadow.”

Ok, it's a novel, written by a computer. Now, everybody can write a software that produces one single novel: just store it as a single string in the program and print it out. The magic happens when the computer can write something that goes way beyond the data that was stored in it exactly for that purpose. So how many different novels can this program write? Does the result exceed considerably the effort of the programmers put in the program itself? Most probably not, otherwise we'd be talking of a general AI.

Re: Did a Human or a Computer Write This?

#34

There is a non-zero amount of reporting that would be improved by algorithmic and model driven story generation. Quite a bit of reporting has become thinly veiled rewrites of press releases, what could be improved by an algorithm that actually had background context and a consistent model for a type of story like a simple preview of a coming game? The amount of statistics in reporting that lacks any context for the n…

"Also distorting our sense of danger is our moral psychology. No one has ever recruited activists to a cause by announcing that things are getting better, and bearers of good news are often advised to keep their mouths shut lest they lull people into complacency. Also, a large swath of our intellectual culture is loath to admit that there could be anything good about civilization, modernity, and Western society."

Steven Pinker in 'The Better Angles of Our Nature - Why Violence Has Declined'.

Pinker makes a convincing argument -with extensive references- that things are getting better. That's no to say that violence isn't still a problem, things have improved though.

What is the collective toll of inducing FUD in our society?

But then... if there's humans tweaking the algorithms machines will just say whatever we want them to.

Re: Did a Human or a Computer Write This?

#35
Only got two wrong [bragging!], and both were sports commentary. but then again I'm not really a sports guy.

Either way that was impressive... I could imagine in the future your phone/tablet scans your favourite websites and generates news stories for you to read, replacing traditional media. If you are into food you can have an entire newspaper generated about the goings on of food!

Re: Did a Human or a Computer Write This?

#36
post #30

Some of these are clearly computer-generated in a way where the human has done most of the work. Take “In truth, I’d love to build some verse for you To churn such verse a billion times a day So type a new concept for me to chew I keep all waiting long, I hope you stay.” Now I'm going to bet a generator algorithm does not actually comprehend the meaning of any that - most likely the generator aspect was filling in so…

Standard set of questions:

How else would a machine do it?

What you describe is similar to how a human would do it, no?

When we look at the brain we don't see awareness, similarly how do we know the machine isn't aware?

Some poetry is so obscure it means nothing to me anyway.

Re: Did a Human or a Computer Write This?

#37
The problem with this quiz, and so many like it, is a bunch of the passages were so badly written. A badly written passage could be a human or a computer, there's no real way to distinguish that. There are 3-4 in here that are well constructed, 1 by a human and a couple by computers. For each, to me, it was obvious which wrote it. The rest I was like "who knows, either a bad writer or a computer but it could be either".

Re: Did a Human or a Computer Write This?

#38
post #30

Some of these are clearly computer-generated in a way where the human has done most of the work. Take “In truth, I’d love to build some verse for you To churn such verse a billion times a day So type a new concept for me to chew I keep all waiting long, I hope you stay.” Now I'm going to bet a generator algorithm does not actually comprehend the meaning of any that - most likely the generator aspect was filling in so…

Standard set of questions: How else would a machine do it? What you describe is similar to how a human would do it, no? When we look at the brain we don't see awareness, similarly how do we know the machine isn't aware? Some poetry is so obscure it means nothing to me anyway.

> How else would a machine do it?

I think in this case the machine is fed human input directly, instructing it what to modify - it is not "discovering" a subject. So presumably it's output range is limited by the set of human input.

As to how else? Well if I knew that presumably I'd have a job at Google.

> What you describe is similar to how a human would do it, no?

Not similar, but surely a human can replicate the mechanical process of taking some ordinary input and turning it into a rhymed stanza - my point was that the ordinary input is clearly not machine generated.

> When we look at the brain we don't see awareness, similarly how do we know the machine isn't aware?

Reflexivity isn't a bad metric - of course there's no proof a human that wrote a poem about a machine writing poems is aware - but most likely I can ask him a simple question about it. If I asked the machine in question, I would probably get my own question back in rhymed stanza form.

Consider also:

That profit was more than any company had ever earned in history.

The obvious guess is that this is written by a human - since history is not a simple concept. Of course one could write an algorithm which is something like if max(current_event, reference_set) == current_event, write for the first-time-in-history.

But clearly this would have nothing really to do with the concept of history only with substituting a boolean evaluation with ordinary-language, precoded by a human.

Re: Did a Human or a Computer Write This?

#40
post #33

Completely meaningless. "Written by a computer" doesn't really mean anything. What's important it's the breadth and variety of the content an algorithm can generate, its ability to choose the most relevant among its input data, and the amount of meaningless content that has to be discarded by a human supervisor before publishing. Take fragment 6: “Tuesday was a great day for W. Roberts, as the junior pitcher threw a…

Fragment 6 would be interesting if the same player happened to receive a career ending injury on the same day.

Would it still talk about how great his day was based purely on the stats it received?

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