
Show HN: RoboTrump – I made a Trump text generator that is fully convincing - kristintynski
https://lawsuit.org/robotrump-an-ai-trump/
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deadmetheny
This is basically useless without a place where you can use it to generate new
random bodies of text on the fly. It's easy to cherry pick 10 good samples out
of hundreds with the intention of attempting to fool people - maybe not so
much if they're generated on the fly.

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commandlinefan
It's also kind of useless if you don't compare it to other subjects: maybe
Trump is easier to imitate than, say, Obama.

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deadmetheny
He almost certainly is - he doesn't have nearly the same gift for public
speaking that Obama did. As pointed out elsewhere in this discussion, his
speech patterns are pretty simple and repetitive, and thus ideal for RNN
training.

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bluntfang
It feels like maybe your bias for Obama is clouding your judgement for
computers to discover and reproduce patterns in general. Like, what evidence
do you have that Obama's speech patterns are easier or harder for ML to
discover and reproduce patterns? And if his patterns are harder, what evidence
do you have that the increase in complexity is meaningful?

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thefounder
Trump's speeches/sentences can be twisted either way you want and nobody can't
tell if it's just gibberish or real statements so the computer has fewer
chances to produce "bad" samples. Just like a broken record!

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bluntfang
Again, this all makes sense anecdotally, but how can you measure how
significant this to produce believable text?

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the8472
Next steps: Link it to those NN video and voice generators, stream endless
trump on twitch.

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kristintynski
that is the next logical step in this fake news dystopia isnt it. Seems like
someone could relatively easily set up a pipeline to generate text, turn text
into Trump's voice, then apply to Deepfake video, churn out millions of
videos... profit. kill democracy. etc.

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mwnivek
Discussion from yesterday:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21315699](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21315699)

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c3534l
Is this like when the Japanese created Mechagodzilla to defeat Godzilla? Are
the Democrats' best hope for 2020 Mechatrump?!

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OJFord
I scored 8/10, and the two I got wrong were both successes of 'RoboTrump'
convincing me. In the other cases, it fell down by not having the
characteristic short sentences and self-interruptions of real Trump -- so
real, people don't believe how real -- speech.

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jdauriemma
This is remarkable, but is there a way for us to access this Trump text
generator without lawsuit.org's curation? I'd love to pull back the curtain
and see how many "tries" it takes to extract a convincing quote.

Edit: honest question, why are people downvoting this comment?

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kristintynski
I can upload the trained model if you are curious, but it was straightforward
to do. I just used the Salesforce CTRL model and fine-tuned it on a large
corpus of Trump speeches.

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bryanrasmussen
I can't help but feel that the real text would not be so difficult to guess if
you did a Robo Carl Sagan or Robo Ursula LeGuin or Robo almost anyone whose
English communication skills would be considered formidable.

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faster
I suspect that because of the nature of his speech (repetitive, shallow,
hyperbolic) he is easier to simulate than someone who communicates in other
ways. I would love to see the same system used to simulate some of the people
you mentioned (and others).

When it's trivial to build fake people with distinctive styles, though, bots
will probably be even more effective. I think that may be a bigger risk than
deepfakes.

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bryanrasmussen
I think that if you're building Bots that can simulate LeGuin you're getting
awful close to XKCD mission accomplished territory though.

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RickJWagner
The thing about Donald Trump is this: Every time he utters a word or Tweets
something, the media goes nuts and publicizes it. It seems completely crazy.

But remember: Donald Trump was never a politician before running for President
as his first run. He was totally outgunned by several well-funded Republican
rivals. He was totally under-funded compared to Hillary Clinton, who also had
huge advantages in media and campaign machinery.

Yet Trump won. With his goofy, outrageous, cant-ignore-them tweets and
statements. He won, 'bigly'. (Haven't heard that one in a while, huh?)

Some day, he'll be remembered as one of the most shrewd self-promoters in
history. Deny it at your peril.

