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Did a Human or a Computer Write This?

nytimes.com

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Re: Did a Human or a Computer Write This?

#61

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

bigphishy wrote: post #52
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and the amount of meaningless content that has to be discarded by a human supervisor before publishing. If that actually happened the web would be a pretty barren place. Some of the most popular tech and science news websites publish short news articles that make you wonder about this sort of stuff. I suppose an algorithm, whether machine or human, is only as good as the operator.

Computer hardware will always be limited by the software that programmers write for it.

Yes, and interesting: the human hardware, despite being apparently self-aware and adaptable, is always limited by the software the operator loads in to it. The hardware has limitations too, of course, though it seems most of our limitations are self-imposed.

I wonder if self-awareness and self-conciousness can actually be decoupled? I think that's what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is on about when he talks of 'flow state' - where 'awareness' becomes decoupled from the 'self'.

Can we program a machine to be better at that than we are? Is that actually an ideal state to be in permanently?

Re: Did a Human or a Computer Write This?

#62

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

vonnik wrote: post #49

Former reporter hear who has been in professional talks with a natural-language generation firm, dabbles in NLP, and has some insight into this process. A lot of what machines churn out is based on templates that humans have created. Many of the things we read that are supposedly written by machines required major human intervention, and the application of strict constraints on the machine so that it wouldn't screw u…

Slightly tangential: while everyone's banging on a lot recently about how 'quality journalism is dying', has anyone actually run the numbers - has anyone done a quantitative analysis?

Was it really the case that 20 or 30 years ago, and early, all / most journalism was high quality, or was it mostly trash back then too? And do we really have proportionately less quality journalism now that we did 'back then'?

If we take in to account all the amazing podcasts we have access to now (eg. 99% Invisible, Australia's ABC Radio National podcasts, etc.) and the NYT, the New Yorker, Saudi Aramco News, etc etc, I'd hazard a guess there's actually a lot more quality journalism kicking about now than there ever was at any time in human history. (Edited to add: at least in this particular human's short history)

I'm just stumbling around in the dark here though. Someone should do a Steven Pinker on this aphorism.

Re: Did a Human or a Computer Write This?

#63

Post by stretchwithme »

Are computers actually writing things? Or filling in a template covering an event that produces data that is expected?

I could write an app that fills out this template:

"Wow, did you see that post on Hacker News? Got X number of views within Y minutes!"

That's not writing. The guy who made the template wrote most of it. The rest is plug and play.

Re: Did a Human or a Computer Write This?

#66

Post by marssaxman »

mod wrote: post #6
carbocation wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

I was not duped by the old english poetry, but only because I recently wrote a Markov-chain / rhyming dictionary based Shakesperean sonnet generator. It's amazing to see a computer generate plausible but meaningless words in a register we generally regard as profound due to age!

Re: Did a Human or a Computer Write This?

#68

Post by jcoffland »

vonnik wrote: post #49

Former reporter hear who has been in professional talks with a natural-language generation firm, dabbles in NLP, and has some insight into this process. A lot of what machines churn out is based on templates that humans have created. Many of the things we read that are supposedly written by machines required major human intervention, and the application of strict constraints on the machine so that it wouldn't screw u…

And what have you paid for 95% of the software you use? I'm guessing you're a free rider.

Re: Did a Human or a Computer Write This?

#69

Post by ridiculous_fish »

Here's a humorous failure mode of computer-authored articles. Zillow bought the real estate company Trulia. The website equities.com then shared its wisdom:

Trulia Inc (TRLA) established a new 52-week low yesterday, and could be a company to watch at the open. After opening at $0.00, Trulia Inc dropped to $0.00 for a new 52-week low.

The article goes on to speculate as to whether this is a buy or sell signal. It's since been deleted but I put the text up here: http://pastebin.com/ihgWNVJU

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