Actually, that could be huge. Rationality blogs generated by bots! Self-improvement blogs generated by bots! Gosh-wow science writing generated by bots!
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.
EHealthMe’s business model is to make an automated program that runs through every single drug and every possible side effect, scrapes the FDA database for examples, then autopublishes an ad-filled web page titled “COULD $DRUG CAUSE $SIDE_EFFECT?”. It populates the page by spewing random FDA data all over it, concludes “$SIDE_EFFECT is found among people who take $DRUG”, and offers a link to a support group for $DRUG patients suffering from $SIDE_EFFECT. Needless to say, the support group is an automatically-generated forum with no posts in it.
Now, you say you want to turn this to the light side..?
Now, you say you want to turn this to the light side..?
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?
I’m just saying it’s so technologically cool, someone will do it as soon as it’s possible.
Ahem. ELIZA, the chat bot, was made in mid-1960s. And...:
Weizenbaum tells us that he was shocked by the experience of releasing ELIZA (also known as “Doctor”) to the nontechnical staff at the MIT AI Lab. Secretaries and nontechnical administrative staff thought the machine was a “real” therapist, and spent hours revealing their personal problems to the program. When Weizenbaum informed his secretary that he, of course, had access to the logs of all the conversations, she reacted with outrage at this invasion of her privacy.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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..?
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.
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...