Did a Human or a Computer Write This?

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/03/08/opinion/sunday/algorithm-human-quiz.html

by tokenadult • 11 years ago

24 8 11 years ago

_yosefk2• 11 years ago

Define "write." Is the output of printf("Should I compare %s to a summer's day", name) written by a human or a computer?

If it's defined to be "written by a human", then I bet that most (all?) of their examples are written by a human in a similar way.

If it's defined to be "written by a computer", then guessing if a human or a computer wrote any of their examples is like guessing the output of coin tossing.

asQuirreL• 11 years ago

Perhaps some notion of entropy would be useful here? Normal information theoretic definitions of entropy usually rely on "bits of entropy". I.e. if you are given information in the form, "Should I compare %s to a summer's day" then how many new bits of information are we actually getting? In this case, it is unbounded, because what we are calling `name` can be arbitrarily long.

But what about if we define entropy in terms of something like parts of speech? Then, the computer can only change one part of speech (the noun phrase to which we compare a summer's day) whilst maintaining the context of the sentence, so in terms of that metric, entropy is low.

With this parts of speech entropy metric in hand maybe we could declare the output of a computer to be "written by a computer" if the entropy in its sentences approaches that of a human writing about the same topic.

Disclaimer: I spent about as much time thinking about this as you did just reading it, so I don't expect this is in any way a fully formed or implementable idea, just food for thought.

_yosefk2• 11 years ago

You need to know how the sentences were constructed then. In their Turing-test-lookalike webpage you get to guess based on the final sentence, which is kinda pointless without the conversation part of the test which precludes canned responses/format strings.

spdustin• 11 years ago

Composed by.

sanqui• 11 years ago

Previously discussed (a month ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9166967

mthq• 11 years ago

Although impressive, this quiz's content seems cherry picked for situations where bots can do well.

On the one hand we have highly informational content such as the one about the earthquake, earnings report and sports game. Reporting on this kind of information can be done in a context free way. Sentences and paragraphs can be self contained and need not reference each other or greater contexts. I only missed the sports game in part because I'm not an American and was not familiar with the game involved. In hindsight the earnings reports stands out from the others since much broader connections are made then just reporting the raw information itself.

On the other hand we have poetry, which is often so hard to parse that nonsense and genius are hard to tell apart, especially for short excerpts like these. I missed the poetry app one because although it read like nonsense for me, as a non native speaker much of these Shakespearean poems do on first sight. I don't know exactly why but "True Love" and "Absurdistan" immidetly stuck me as fake and real respectivly. For example I thought it was weird to be that her nerves where strained as two tight strings, and that someone would make her drink hot wine. Also the "True Love" excerpt seems very factual and deseperate where "Absurdistan" paints more of an atmosphere.

jxf• 11 years ago

For example I thought it was weird [...] that someone would make her drink hot wine.

Hot wine is very much a thing (and it's delicious)! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulled_wine

graylights• 11 years ago

It could report on small events that are normally not covered to. Further it could customize articles based on readers interests. Have a favorite player? He is now highlighted in your articles.

It could also do vanity articles. Go back to your college days and write about your games, making you the highlight.

Worse it could be influenced to do personalized advertisements in the middle of the article.

Did a Human or a Computer Write This?

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