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Lumifer comments on Upcoming LW Changes - Less Wrong Discussion
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On a tangential note: it would be cute for LW to acquire a collection of resident chat bots, preferably ones which could be dissected and rewired by all and sundry. Erecting defences against chat bots run amok would also be enlightening :-)
Watson can already philosophize at you from TED talks. Someone needs to develop a chat bot based on it, and have it learn from the Sequences.
Actually, that could be huge. Rationality blogs generated by bots! Self-improvement blogs generated by bots! Gosh-wow science writing generated by bots!
At present, most bot-written books are pretty obviously junk, but instead of going for volume and long tails, you could hire human editors to make the words read more as if they were originated by a human being. They'd have to have a good command of English, though, so the stereotypical outsourcing to Bangalore wouldn't be good enough. Ideally, you'd want people who were not just native speakers, but native to American culture, smart, familiar with the general area of the ideas, and good with words. Existing bloggers, that is. Offer this to them as a research tool. It would supply a blogger with a stream of article outlines and the blogger would polish them up. Students with essays to write could use it as well, and since every essay would be different, you wouldn't be able to detect it wasn't the student's work by googling phrases from it.
This is such a technologically good idea that it must happen within a few years.
LOL. Wake up and smell the tea :-) People who want to push advertising into your eyeballs now routinely construct on-demand (as in, in response to a Google query) websites/blogs/etc. just so that you'd look at them and they get paid for ad impressions.
See e.g. recent Yvain:
Now, you say you want to turn this to the light side..?
Are these things going to fool any actual human, or just Google's algorithms, i.e., that people see it in Google's searches, possibly click, but don't look at it any closer.
Yes, I think so, at least for a while. These actual humans will probably be old, not terribly smart, uncomfortable with that weird world of internet, somewhat gullible or at least prone to putting a bit too much trust into printed word...
There is an interesting article about how and why people are susceptible to such things.
It is also an interesting experiment in how many times one can include the word "bullshit" into a serious, peer-reviewed article.
I'm just saying it's so technologically cool, someone will do it as soon as it's possible. Whether it would actually be good in the larger scheme of things is quite another matter. I can see an arms race developing between drones rewriting bot-written copy and exposers of the same, together with scandals of well-known star bloggers discovered to be using mechanical assistance from time to time. There would be a furious debate over whether using a bot is actually a legitimate form of writing. All very much like drugs and sport.
Bot-assisted writing may make the traditional essay useless as a way of assessing students, perhaps to be replaced by oral exams in a Faraday cage. On Facebook, how will you know whether your friends' witticisms are their own work, especially the ones you've never been face to face with?
Ahem. ELIZA, the chat bot, was made in mid-1960s. And...:
I'm aware of ELIZA, and of Yvain's post. ELIZA's very shallow, and the interactive setting gives it an easier job than coming up with 1000 words on "why to have goals" or "5 ways to be more productive". I do wonder whether some of the clickbait photo galleries are mechanically generated.
Here.
I guess I just think of chatbots as "old tech" and not as "new and cool" :-/ ELIZA, as you mention, is extremely simple, and still was able to tap into emotional responses. Nowadays we have Siri and Cortana, the Japanese virtual girlfriends, etc.etc.
I am also not sure that the ability to generate coherent text (as opposed to generating original, meaningful, useful content) is that valuable nowadays. The intertubes are already clogged with mediocre-to-awful blog posts -- there are enough humans for that.
So, early on people were excited about machine translation--yeah, it wasn't great, but you could just have human translators start from the machine translation and fix the mess.
The human translators hated it, because it moved from engaging intellectual work to painful copyediting. I think a similar thing will be true for article writers.
The talented ones, yes, but there will be a lot of temptation for the also rans. You've got a blogging deadline and nothing is coming together, why not fire up the bot and get topical article ideas? "It's just supplying facts and links, and the way it weaves them into a coherent structure, well I could have done that, of course I could, but why keep a dog and bark myself? The real creative work is in the writing." That's how I see the slippery slope starting, into the Faustian pact.
I... have never heard this idiom before, and now want to use it all the time.
The pitch generator and story generator on TVTropes is sort of like this, although far less sophisticated.
Cute, but I think probably a really terrible idea.
The collection would come with a per-user flag which, when set to "Go Away", will make the existence of chatbots and all their doings entirely invisible to the user. Or you can sandbox the chatbots in a subreddit of their own.
LW needs some fun and games -- chatbots would provide a good playground.
Maybe if it was a particularly philosophical one.
(typical 'fun in moderation' comment here)