(Article) This is either great, or damn scary, or both!
If it really works well, I'd not have expected such a thing to happen for another couple of decades. Even in just one of the many applications he claims, it seems astonishingly advanced.
Computers won’t be replacing humans for writing the great American novel or entertaining the masses on TV, but it is obvious that computers will be an increasing fixture in the analysis and translation of content. This is a perfect complement to human creativity — not something for creatives, researchers, or consumers to fear.
I hope so. I think many people's first reaction is fear, particularly big visions of what happened to typesetters in the eighties soon happening to writers and video game producers and whatnot. But it does seem to potentially have great promise in areas where human production would just be too costly, where the potential market is very small. And the devil's advocate might say: if you can't do your job better than a machine, how much did you really contribute? Of course getting people to actually pay for the additional quality a human touch can add, can be very tricky, sadly.
... No sooner written than I stumble over an example of the sometimes-poor quality of human writing, this article on the very same site, about android sex partners. The writer talks about androids (humanoid robots), but calls them "cyborgs", which is another thing, it's part human, part machine, Robocop for example.
Update:
Bert said:
Wonderful... in some utopian world. Anyone who has done extensive research through literature will tell you that the bulk of the work is identifying and discarding the garbage. I cannot see how a computer would achieve this, except in areas where the amount of source material is large enough to isolate any and all outliers. And even that implies some degree of real understanding of the topic at hand...
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Wonderful... in some utopian world. Anyone who has done extensive research through literature will tell you that the bulk of the work is identifying and discarding the garbage. I cannot see how a computer would achieve this, except in areas where the amount of source material is large enough to isolate any and all outliers. And even that implies some degree of real understanding of the topic at hand...
ReplyDeleteThis gizmo might still be useful in very specific and limited contexts, but even then I am highly skeptical.
As for generating movie plots, please tell me that the guy isn't serious! Hollywood already lacks imagination to a scary point, so if we are to have confusers rehash the same plotlines ad nauseam, this will be the death of cinema!
Fair point. Add to this beliefs about what is garbage and what is not. Just look at the field of healthcare! The amount of warring beliefs is staggering.
ReplyDeleteRe Hollywood, I suspect TTL would tell you that we probably will not be able to detect the difference, and I'm not sure I'll be up to arguing with that.
Hmmm... did he actually talk about actual fiction, or movie scripts? I can't find that. Seems to be more about more trivial content, like games, game shows...
ReplyDeleteThat video was an insult to the viewers intelligence. The guy is trying to lure in some unsophisticated investor in order to get money for college. I hope no investor is quite that gullible!
ReplyDeleteBut this is not to say that automatic content creation, even to the scale he hints at, is not possible. There are many such applications already in use today. In the field of law and medicine, for example. And architecture. Arts too (for example Artmatic, as demonstrated by Eo in this very forum).
The problem of course is that it is so difficult to come up with a hit even when a human is doing it, so relegating the creative process to a computer will not exactly improve your chances of success!
Who would want to watch a tomato in TV explain a 100,000 foreign language words? Me neither.
I cannot see how a computer would achieve this
ReplyDeleteHow many times has this been said? In time, they'll manage it.