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.
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.