
I Tried to Get an AI to Write This Story - dsgerard
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-05-17/i-tried-to-get-an-ai-to-write-this-story-paul-ford
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petercooper
Not mentioned but
[https://narrativescience.com/](https://narrativescience.com/) are a major
player in this space. I believe they are more oriented around turning
structured data into natural language, however, so their tech gets used for
financial reports, match reports, etc.

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nartz
Machine Learning is very different than software engineering. There is no
reason that being good at one makes you good at the other.

Does being a carpenter with vast knowledge of tools give you the ability to
build a rocket that can fly to mars?

Machine Learning is very very math based - the nitty gritty matters when you
want to do something custom.

There are many free pre-trained models that can get you started easily for
defined tasks. Custom work requires much more knowledge.

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pests
It's not magic. Anyone can learn.

I think you are doing yourself and anyone reading a disservice by thinking it
cannot be learned like any other field, like software engineering.

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hyperpallium
like any other field... like higher mathematics?

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yorwba
If you have the motivation to learn, it can be done. "Higher mathematics" is a
bit broad, but you can choose a more specific topic you're interested in, get
a textbook and work through the exercises. When you get stuck, find someone
you can discuss your solution attempts with, either in person or e.g. on
MathOverflow. If you realize that you're missing some prerequisites, get a
textbook on those and recurse. Don't expect this process to be faster or
require less work than getting a degree.

~~~
hyperpallium
My comment contrasted parent and GP.

    
    
      > > Custom work requires much more knowledge.
      > Anyone can learn.[...] like software engineering.
    

Math is hard.

BTW I tried the recurse method for about a year, but it became impossible to
find some prerequisites - I think because certain basics are assumed, and not
always explicitly taught at any stage. A kind of oral tradition. So I'm now
refreshing (and sometimes learning) high school algebra/pre-calculus at Khan
Academy (and Math SE).

Though that mightn't apply to someone with solid high school maths already. My
high schooling was interrupted, also maybe I'm a bit stupid, and also need
deeper explanation to get it.

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AdmiralAsshat
I'd say that the limits of AI and Machine Learning were succinctly captured by
an episode of The Prisoner back in 1967:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljGH07Unfe8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljGH07Unfe8)

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hyperpallium
Is there an objective measure of how well DL generates text (as in the
article)?

No. But there is one for how accurately it predicts test text, not in its
training corpus.

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mproud
Good. The last thing we need is people manipulating AI to write fake articles
to generate dishonest revenue (and frankly, it’s probably half-happening
already).

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ry_ry
Comments created by bots have existed for years.

Before AI was the new hotness, hyperbolic tech tabloid The Register used to
(it may still? I only ever read the BOFH articles) have a frequent commentor
called 'a man from mars' who was quite clearly a bot of some description
outputting semi-coherent nonsense based on the content of the articles and
other comments.

Despite largely spouting wordy nonsense, people would regularly reply to it's
comments and attempt to engage a glorified toaster in rational debate. Now
throw tensorflow at that, and you can do some fairly interesting things...

