
XPrize up for Artificial Intelligence that can give a TED talk - mihaialin
http://www.techtimes.com/articles/4679/20140321/xprize-ai-give-ted-talk.htm
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electrograv
I worry that this could be even more succeptible for a 'bag of tricks' AI to
win than a traditional Turing Test, after looking at the rules[1].

Chatbots that perform the best on a traditional Turing Test are all extremely
specialized 'bag of tricks' approaches. They can be surprisingly convincing,
because they often use huge databases of real human responses to construct
their own -- if you haven't already, I'd recommend giving Cleverbot a try[2].

However these chatbots often fail when an important continuity of facts is
being discussed in context, where their parrot-like nature is exposed.
Therefore I think this "TED XPRIZE" will be much easier to fool in this sense,
because there's only two questions from the judges. This essentially removes
the most difficult AI challenges of a traditional turing test.

Of course, succeeding at the "TED XPRIZE" would without a doubt require
legitimate and significant advancements to the field of artificial
intelligence and machine learning. Synthesizing a convincing talk/essay with
an engaging narrative and central theme is no easy task (though limited
successes already exist [3]).

But even now computers can beat humans in very specialized areas (and
specialization is a key requirement to this). For example, we already have
human level-facial recognition[4] and superhuman character recognition[5].
Similarly, while it would indeed be a legitimate AI advancement to be able to
construct such a speech, I do not believe this would be any more a holy grail
of AGI than character recognition and facial recognition. Instead, it would be
incremental progress disguising itself as having already arrived.

[1] [http://www.xprize.org/ted-rules](http://www.xprize.org/ted-rules)

[2] [http://cleverbot.com](http://cleverbot.com)

[3] [http://www.geekosystem.com/journal-accepts-nonsense-
paper/](http://www.geekosystem.com/journal-accepts-nonsense-paper/)

[4]
[https://www.facebook.com/publications/546316888800776/](https://www.facebook.com/publications/546316888800776/)

[5]
[http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.84.1...](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.84.1887)

~~~
psuter
From these bags of tricks, we can learn a lot about, if not AI, at least
humans. My favorite example in that category is MGonz [1]:

    
    
        "In 1989 MGonz was able to fool a human subject for over an hour [...]
        MGonz worked on a simple principle: don’t reply to statements. Merely
        insult the person making the statement. Most of MGonz’s one-liners are
        too profane to repeat – but “ah, type something interesting or shut-up”,
        “what sort of idiot types something like that”, and “that’s it, I’m not
        talking to you anymore!” are fairly representative of the style. The
        programme simply pours a torrent of abuse on the unwitting human at the
        other end of the internet connection."
    

[1] [http://www.saintsandsceptics.org/the-mgonz-
test/](http://www.saintsandsceptics.org/the-mgonz-test/)

~~~
DanBC
Someone should create a reddit bot and see if anyone at all notices that it's
a bot.

There are novelty accounts that only provide praise, so perhaps a nice version
could also be created too.

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skosuri
I think XPrize lost a lot of credibility when the pulled the Genomics X-prize
because the competition was "outpaced by innovation" [1].

[1] [http://genomics.xprize.org/](http://genomics.xprize.org/)

~~~
smd4
I'm surprised that for a mere $10M they were willing to simultaneously torpedo
the xprize brand and forever enshrine their irrelevance to actual innovation.

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moron4hire
Easy. TED Talks are already ALICEbots trained on BuzzFeed articles anyway.

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jotux
Has it been confirmed that Reggie Watts is not a robot and has not already won
this prize?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdHK_r9RXTc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdHK_r9RXTc)

~~~
jere
That video is the perfect response for why this is a silly idea. A clever chat
bot can beat the Turing test, but in a TED talk you don't even have to deal
with probing questions. All you have to do is babble on about something
vaguely inspiring.

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nsxwolf
Since a TED talk is not interactive, what does that even mean? My TI-99/4A
with Speech Synthesizer could give a TED talk.

~~~
arjie
Here's the procedure I followed:

1\. Pick two keywords that describe this event. "TED" and "XPrize" seem like
good candidates since they (together) identify this.

2\. Go to Google (in a private browsing window, if you wish non-bubble
results) and type in these keywords together. Here is an example URL:
[https://www.google.com/search?q=TED+Xprize](https://www.google.com/search?q=TED+Xprize)
. Order is irrelevant so long as phrases are maintained as phrases.

3\. Click the first non-ad result:
[http://www.xprize.org/ted](http://www.xprize.org/ted)

4\. Observe that the page says that the rules are not yet set in stone but
that a 'sample' exists: [http://www.xprize.org/ted-
rules](http://www.xprize.org/ted-rules)

5\. Follow that link to reach a page which says that "...the competing A.I. is
given 30 minutes to prepare a compelling 3 min TED Talk" once it receives a
subject.

The conclusion is the following:

The AI must actually construct the TED Talk, i.e. the words of the TED Talk
must be programmatically constructed given a topic.

This being the case, I doubt your TI-99/4A would deliver a performance
compelling enough to stand and applaud. While I'm sure you searched before
asking the question, I hope that this guide helped you construct your search
for information better.

~~~
nsxwolf
Yes, thank you for Googling that for me. I think it's better to include at
least some of those facts in the article, though.

~~~
arjie
Ha ha, certainly, that would have been nice. I'm disappointed that I didn't
even draw a chuckle. After all, I'm a human posting a mechanical sounding
comment on a thread about machines speaking like humans.

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pjmorris
Did anybody else think 'I bet we could retrain the Hacker News headline
generator with past TED talks?'

~~~
Houshalter
That's just a really simple markov chain generator. If someone could get a
bunch of transcripts of TED talks in plain text, this would be pretty
straightforward.

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lnanek2
> All of this must be accomplished with no human interaction with the
> mechanical being.

Well that makes things much easier. Answering questions without giving the
game away would be impossible, after all. Generating an expert system to just
walk around and generate a passing talk without any interaction is pretty
easy, though.

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kens
How many _humans_ could get a standing ovation for a TED talk on an arbitrary
subject after 30 minutes preparation? I know I couldn't. It seems bizarre to
create an AI challenge that most people couldn't meet.

I wonder how far you could get, though, with an AI that strung together
phrases like a struggling beauty pageant contestant or politician: "I think
world peace is important because uh education is the key to success and uh
what really matters is the children and uh that's what makes America great!"

~~~
lutusp
> I wonder how far you could get, though, with an AI that strung together
> phrases like a struggling beauty pageant contestant or politician: "I think
> world peace is important because uh education is the key to success and uh
> what really matters is the children and uh that's what makes America great!"

Hmm -- you clearly haven't listened to many TED talks, because lots of them
sound just like that. Having listened to about 100 of them over the years, I
eventually came to the conclusion that the most popular ones acquired their
acclaim by being as formulaic as possible -- say positive things, don't
mystify your audience, build your talk out of a series of verbal
bumperstickers.

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al2o3cr
Moar like "artificial non-intelligence", you mean.

On the upside, the people who would lose their jobs to a robot that could
actually climb up its own asshole would be REALLY shocked. :)

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lutusp
Yes, this should work, because the organizers have a realistic grasp of (a)
the present state of AI, and (b) the low intellectual level required for a
typical TED talk.

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xamdam
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02bwfcV2h9A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02bwfcV2h9A)

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weirdkid
So, in other words, an AI that can pitch a book?

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mark_l_watson
For this to be valid, the robot would have to take a wide variety of questions
from the audience and provide good answers.

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georgemcbay
They should have a sub-prize where if you can make an AI that can give a TEDx
talk, you get like 1% of the full prize.

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PaulHoule
Couldn't Miku Hatsune do this now?

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njharman
Artificial charisma is what's need for talk.

~~~
mihaialin
Yes that's true, but I think that we are far away from being able to create
artificial charisma, it is pretty hard to write a machine learning algorithm
that can mimic emotions.

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sorindumi
Fascinating!

