{"id":9845,"date":"2019-04-21T00:57:36","date_gmt":"2019-04-21T07:57:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/BigJimIndustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=9845"},"modified":"2019-05-19T01:01:07","modified_gmt":"2019-05-19T08:01:07","slug":"robot-authors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2019\/04\/21\/robot-authors\/","title":{"rendered":"Robot Authors"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

from The Guardian<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The rise of robot authors: is the writing on the wall for human novelists?<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

Artificial intelligence can now write fiction and journalism. But does it measure up to George Orwell \u2013 and can it report on Brexit?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

by Steven Poole<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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An industrial robot writes out the Bible. Photograph: Amy Cicconi\/Alamy<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Will androids write novels about electric sheep? The dream, or nightmare, of totally machine-generated prose seemed to have come one step closer with the recent announcement of an artificial intelligence that could produce, all by itself, plausible news stories or fiction. It was\u00a0the brainchild of OpenAI<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 a nonprofit lab backed by\u00a0Elon Musk<\/a>\u00a0and other tech entrepreneurs \u2013 which slyly alarmed the literati by announcing that the AI (called GPT2) was\u00a0too dangerous for them to release<\/a>\u00a0into the wild, because it could be employed to create \u201cdeepfakes for text\u201d. \u201cDue to our concerns about malicious applications of the technology,\u201d they said, \u201cwe are not releasing the trained model.\u201d Are machine-learning entities going to be the new weapons of information terrorism, or will they just put humble midlist novelists out of business?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let\u2019s first take a step back. AI has been the next big thing for so long that it\u2019s easy to assume \u201cartificial intelligence\u201d now exists. It doesn\u2019t, if by \u201cintelligence\u201d we mean what we sometimes encounter in our fellow humans. GPT2 is just using methods of statistical analysis, trained on huge amounts of human-written text \u2013 40GB of web pages, in this case, that received recommendations from Reddit readers \u2013 to predict what ought to come next. This probabilistic approach is how Google Translate works, and also the method behind Gmail\u2019s automatic replies (\u201cOK.\u201d \u201cSee you then.\u201d \u201cThat\u2019s fine!\u201d) It can be eerily good, but it is not as intelligent as, say, a bee.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Right now, novelists don\u2019t seem to have much to fear. Fed the opening line of\u00a0George Orwell<\/a>\u2019s\u00a0Nineteen Eighty-Four<\/a><\/em>\u00a0\u2013 \u201cIt was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen\u201d \u2013 the machine continued the narrative as follows: \u201cI was in my car on my way to a new job in Seattle. I put the gas in, put the key in, and then I let it run. I just imagined what the day would be like. A hundred years from now. In 2045, I was a teacher in some school in a poor part of rural China. I started with Chinese history and history of science.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[ click to continue reading at The Guardian<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from The Guardian The rise of robot authors: is the writing on the wall for human novelists? Artificial intelligence can now write fiction and journalism. But does it measure up to George Orwell \u2013 and can it report on Brexit? by Steven Poole Will androids write novels about electric sheep? The dream, or nightmare, of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9845","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-art","category-literary-news","category-weirdness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9845","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9845"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9845\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9845"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9845"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}