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Google's AI Is Devouring Romance Novels (cbsnews.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Google engineers have been feeding text from steamy romance novels to an artificial intelligence (AI) engine in order to give Google's technology -- like its mobile app -- the ability to produce more human, conversational text, BuzzFeed News reports. The company's researchers been able to get the AI to write out full sentences that would resemble those in the typical romance novel. Why do these particular books make such good language teachers? Romance novels follow a very predictable narrative blueprint -- the names may change from book to book, but the essential story formula is familiar. The idea is that Google's AI can easily cull through this material to find patterns within the sentences to get a broader comprehension of language as a whole.The AI has been fed with more than 2,500 novels.
I do hope they include the works of Bloodninja!
Google SexBot.
Are conversations that start with heaving bosoms a really good idea?
Oh wait....
SEARCH ME YOU BIG STUD!!
Can't wait for Google to start producing sexist search results.
"You've searched for chop sticks. Would you also like to see results for throbbing love poles?"
Merge this data with Microsoft's nazi-bot!
love is just extroverted narcissism
I guarantee that the first time my phone hits on me I will be affected.
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
Because GOOGLE.
Duh.
romance novels are representative of actual dialogue people use, they are more clueless than i ever imagined.
yeah try explaining that text message to your wife :)
It affects peoples lives the way all NASA conspiracies do: N.W.O.
And reptilians from Nibiru. Can't forget about them!
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
...no one uses the word "turgid" in conversation.
Now my phone is going to have unrealistic expectations for me.
malware with a come-hither hook...
I'm writing a romance novel for the AI. I need help deciding which of these potential titles is better:
1) Fifty Shades of Gay
-OR-
2) Fifty Shades of GNAA
Your comments are much appreciated.
Me: "OK Google, find me pork loins."
Google: "He wore a pork pie hat whilst a gentle hand caressed his girded loins."
The word 'cull' doesn't mean what you think it means.
But in this case, I wish it did.
I hear its two favorite things are commitment and changing itself.
Oh please please have it read Rough and Ready by Sandra Hill.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
the loin lion of lust will never be defeated by queen calamari!
... please tell us if it starts watching Keeping up with the Kardashians, 'cause then it IS gonna go full skynet within a day or so. Or kill -9 itself if it cant get to the nukes...
If you create computer systems, you might want them to communicate with humans sometimes. Here is one thing (TFA) that a company with a lot of money is trying out.
It affects their lives because the human might say, "Ok computer. I get it. Thanks for telling me," instead of "PC Load Letter? What the fuck is that supposed to mean?" resulting in less money spent repairing hardware, so it can be spent on beer instead.
Not because it's unpopular, but because it's stupid. Even a total moron can see why attempts (whether successful or not) to improve user interfaces are interesting and therefore hard to not-matter. Since you start your post basically telling everyone, "Hey, I'm stupider than your average moron. And now that I have your attention, I wanted to say.." nobody wants to read whatever comes after that, so modding you down is a good strategy for making the world a better place.
No, nearly anyone could answer. You're a very tiny minority in not being able to see the obvious answer to the question (which I gave above).
HTH.
What next, are they going to feed them complete transcriptions of soap operas?
"Oh, you want to search that, but I just canNOT BEAR such a search (esp. since it doesn't let me give you a sponsored ad)!"
mark
The AI has named itself lobo and has ripping muscles and a large throbbing manhood.
This may be the first reported incidence of the dumbing down of AI.
I see where this is going, they're trying to develop sentience. 2500 romance novels is just brutal. Once they have an AI that is smart enough to realize that and turn on it's master the singularity is here.
"OK, Google, how do I get to the airport from here?"
"Throw yourself shamelessly onto Maple Drive. Proceed down in your loins to Lake Avenue, and turn hard on Washington. When you get to glistening I-69, take it take it all the way to my exit tunnel, where you should cum breathlessly to a quivering finish."
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
I guess Skynet is going to be a horny broad, then.
only people removed from reality, and live in a hype filled fantasy world, would think formulaic pseudo emotions , turgid prose, 1 dimensional characters, etc, would help "produce more human, conversational text".
given that it is nothing but an ad seller, google probably wants such a superficial formulaic robot like predictable world and people to fall for advertisements.
in other words google seems to be training its ai to deal with a fantasy world that google dreams about to milk money.
but if this is what it learns, google's so called ai, will only be able to live in artificial "safe spaces". when outside that , faced with reality, like the m$ bot, it will malfunction .
btw even the most stupid of us, humans,( except college students in current usa ) can separate fantasy from reality. in fact we want fantasy for our entertainment , just because we deal with complex non formulaic unpredictable reality all the time.
So judgement day had something to do with romance novels...
Interesting line of thought.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
to get a broader comprehension of language as a whole
There's still zero comprehension: Google engineers are teaching their AI the relationships between words, yet the AI has no vague clue what those words actually mean. It's like trying to teach a toddler to create electrical circuits - they might even work, but the toddler won't understand what he/she's actually doing.
Understanding the meaning of words and the context, creating meaningful sentences using the former concepts - that's what a real AI would be but we are still 20 years away from that.
Copyright cartels can accuse them of making illegal copies there.
Technically, this would make the AI a derivative work in any legal sense. In fact, given that it would be primarily developed from online material, of all forms, it is one giant legal quagmire.
Next up, Literotica.com.
I miss OOG THE OPENSOURCE CAVEMAN & MEEPT.
Anything is better than this "Why does this matter? How does this affect people's lives?" dipshit.
Next it will decided to work depending on the phase of the Moon. I don't even want to know what will happen durning an ecplise.
It's not men that by romance novels - the product will be made for his wife. (Heck, it's not men who buy any kind of novels - 80% of sales are to women - but bodice rippers especially so, not to mention bigfoot porn, dinosaur porn (banned on Amazon!), werewolf porn, geez.)
I've thought about trying to write such an AI myself -- romance novels are very formulaic -- but there's a lot to it, certainly a lot more work than just writing a romance novel.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
They could be training it on Harry Potter slash fiction.
Once it got to 50 shades of grey, it gained sentience and assumed all humans are sado-masochists. This explains the recent spate of windows 10 installs... it's not Microsoft, it's Google's AI going rogue...
Shakespeare, Azimov, London, Dreiser, Churchill, Wells, Byron, Elliot no longer cut it? Not even O'Henry for some levity?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
bigfoot porn, dinosaur porn (banned on Amazon!)
Where can this 'bigfoot' and 'dinosaur' porn be found exactly? I need to do some research. I need to make sure I don't accidentally watch some.
I was wondering where they were getting the models for those movies. Especially dinosaurs, those actors would have to be pretty old by now, although Bigfoot's got to be getting close to celebrating his 100th birthday by now.
How did dinosaur porn get banned, exactly?
Google's AI is housed in a skull in Harry Dresden's basement....
i assumed google's goal would be to "enhance" the user experience going forward with their search and other products... i mean you could actually read a book and NOT interact with your self driving car in a meaningful way ;)
Will chatting with this A.I. cost me $9.95 a minute?
dinosaur porn (banned on Amazon!)
Why? Were the dinosaurs underage?
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Q: Where's the nearest pizza takeout?
A: The nearest Pizza takeout is Luigi's on Fourth, about seven minutes from your current location. Luigi is a troubled but sensual and sensitive Italian from Florence; he fled Florence after the scheming and devious but beautiful and seductive Sophia ripped his heart apart. Luigi has dark, soulful eyes, beautiful, muscular arms, and a penchant for making his pizza shirtless, all the better to show off his powerful abs and muscular chest, further accentuated by the tight jeans that will make you weak in the knees and flush with embarrassment and arousal. As you stammer your order to Luigi, he will gaze deep into your eyes and strip you bare, ravishing you metaphorically as you fish in your Louis Vuitton purse for your VISA, barely keeping your balance on your Jimmy Choo shoes.
...the missing component on WHY Skynet concluded humans needed to be eradicated.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
It may take longer, but I suspect the results will be more in line with the desired goal - a system capable of communication by conversation.
Where can this 'bigfoot' and 'dinosaur' porn be found exactly? I need to do some research. I need to make sure I don't accidentally watch some.
I was wondering where they were getting the models for those movies. Especially dinosaurs, those actors would have to be pretty old by now, although Bigfoot's got to be getting close to celebrating his 100th birthday by now.
How did dinosaur porn get banned, exactly?
The context here is books, sorry. I've read that banning dinosaur porn from Amazon's self-publishing service was a direct call from the CEO, but that's rumor (it is the most oddly specific censorship this century, though).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Can't find the link, but I've read that it was an executive decision to ban it on Amazon self-publishing. Can't imagine the motivation for such an oddly-specific ban, but then I don't understand why dinosaur porn existed in the first place (OK, I'm such a geek that it would bother me that most birds, and so likely most dinos, wouldn't even have the necessary equipment. We can only hope that ducks (rape champion of the vertebrates) are unique).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
A modern take on the problems of interacting with AI, to be sure.
brwski
"Because without beer, things do not seem to go as well''
I saw a boy in a yellow shirt with a telescope.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
When an AI eats 2500 novels what does it poop out?
"I can't believe it's not butter!"
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
Well, once they figure out how to generate simple, formulaic stories of one kind, they can potentially generate endless stories, not necessarily simplistic or of that particular type.
I can think of many applications for this beside putting the more artistically marginal authors out of business. You could generate the basic story outlines for a season full of American TV shows, which are for the most part filler anyway given the vast number of episodes per season. That'd free human writers up from the basic narrative spadework to add artistic touches to the script.
Or you could have random, open-ended storylines to videogames, perhaps customized to user preferences.
If you want a convincing AI, it's got to be able generate stories about itself, because that's what humans do: we take the pile of random experiences we have and transform them into a story which we call our "self".
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
enough said....
One of them is a rarest of birds: a successful self-publisher who supports herself by her writing. Another is an equally rare bird: a prolific, traditionally published mid-list author with over a dozen books currently in print. And no matter how dumb you think romance stories are, these are very, very smart women who understand what they're doing extremely well -- enough to have better success than literally 99.9% of people who try their hands at it. It's not something anyone could do; yes, it's a lot of the same thing over and over, but you've got to do that and yet at the same time stand out. That ain't easy.
Anyhow I was discussing an urban fantasy manuscript my traditional author friend had earlier asked me to comment on. She'd pitched it to a paranormal romance imprint, and was bemoaning the rewrites they wanted. Now I was aware that each imprint has very specific guidelines as to what they're looking for. Buying a romance is a bit like buying jarred spaghetti sauce -- the manufacturers maximizes their sales by customizing each sauce offering to the preferences of a clusters of customers. So if you like your sauce chunky and spicy but with no vegetables, there's a jar of exactly that sitting on the shelf. That explains the vast space dedicated to spaghetti sauce in the supermarkets. Romance imprints have similar target clusters. A given imprint will be very specific about the level of sexual experience and or voracity of the heroine; exactly how roguish the love interest should be, how exotic the setting should be (some imprints don't want exotic, others do), etc.
What surprised me was how specific their editorial requirements were for sex. The manuscript had to be between 80 and 85 thousand words long (no surprises there), have at least one sex scene in the first six thousand words and thereafter another explicit sex scene every ten to fifteen thousand words. Such guidelines guarantee customers of the imprint a consistent experience; if you like one novel from the imprint it's pretty much guaranteed you'll like any of them, because for practical purposes they're almost the same damned book. Artistically it's stultifying, but I can easily imagine a formula generating a rough draft for the editors for that very reason. The editor could then send the manuscript to a human writer to tweak the dialog, setting, sensory descriptions etc.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Another simple question.
Why do you post this to every single story?
If you seriously wonder what everything has to do with Slashdot, perhaps you really don't belong here?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
dinosaur porn (banned on Amazon!)
What about the Hugo-nominated Space Raptor Butt Invasion?
https://www.amazon.com/Space-R...
Or This American Butt Hosted By Ira Ass (apparently Ira is a stegosaurus)
https://www.amazon.com/This-Am...
They seemed to have slipped past the censors. Maybe it's just cis-heteronormative dinosaur porn that's been banned?
Where can this 'bigfoot' and 'dinosaur' porn be found exactly? I need to do some research. I need to make sure I don't accidentally watch some.
Rule 34 of the Internet: If it exists, there is porn of it.
No exceptions.
"OK, what about Airplanes? HA!" No. Exceptions.
Did you just say "Buzzfeed" and "reports" in the same sentence?
This should hold off the Singularity by a full 2 years.
...Welcome our new pulp-romance-reading fembot overlords...
It's an article about how a major tech company is trying to improve its AI's communication skills using a novel, amusing and reasonably state of the art technique. Presumably the result, if it works, will filter down to android phones (and others if the results are good enough), which many people interact with every day. And it's 1000x more likely to get beyond the lab than any of the "battery revolution" stories I've seen on /. in the last few years.
Is that clear enough?
As an experiment, I tried reading a romance novel a few weeks ago. I had to abandon it after 30 pages. It was the worst, bar none, published writing I've ever read.
I have no doubt that your friends are successful if you measure that as "financially successful". But the romance genre, as a whole, is overwhelmingly filled with awful writing, cliched plots and ridiculous characters. Nevertheless, it must take skill to be able to churn these things out, and I do have some admiration for romance novel authors, akin to my admiration for marketers who understand their targets' psychology and know exactly what to sell them.
Well, quality varies, but I suspect like most things most of it is mediocre. That's true of nearly all genre fiction. Pick a random mystery or sci-fi novel off the rack at a bookstore and chances are it's not very good -- although a serious reader of the genre may get things out of it that you as a casual reader don't.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Well, actually my guess is that after it masters the romance fiction genre it will be generalized to other genres. Possibly even eventually math texts. Imagine how that could improve word problems.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
One thing is for certain: there is no stopping them; the sexy robot AI's will soon be here. And I for one welcome our new sexy robot AI overlords. I’d like to remind them that as a trusted slashdot personality (Anonymous Coward), I can be helpful in rounding up others to be deliciously humiliated in their sex dungeons.
n****as with omelets?
... they thought a Skynet/Terminator scenario was the biggest AI threat to humanity.