Slashdot Mirror
When an AI Tries Writing Slashdot Headlines (tumblr.com)
She trained it separately on the first decade of Slashdot headlines -- 1997 through 2007 -- as well as the second decade from 2008 to the present, and then re-ran the entire experiment using the whole collection of every headline from the last 20 years. Among the remarkable machine-generated headlines?
- Microsoft To Develop Programming Law
- More Pong Users for Kernel Project
- New Company Revises Super-Things For Problems
- Steve Jobs To Be Good
But that was just the beginning...
Those five headlines were all derived from the first decade, but it's really nice to see that Steve Jobs made it into both decades. When training on the second set of 82,871 headlines from Slashdot's second decade, the neural network began envisioning the co-founder of Apple tackling even greater challenges.
- Steve Jobs Allowed To Deal With Solar Power
- Steve Jobs Sues Death of the Future
The neural network "did its best to reflect the new topics of the last decade," Janelle writes, adding "Compared to the late 1990s and early 2000s, some companies and topics disappeared, while the coverage of Apple in particular exploded."
But Sun Microsystems also founds its way into several headlines -- especially when Janelle tried to create the "essential" Slashdot headline using the whole 20-year set.
- Sun Sues Open Source Project Content
- Sun Sues New Star Trek To Stop The Math
And as technology continues changing our world, Sun isn't the only company that the neural network saw pushing for new rights in court.
- Sony Sues Apple Server For Seconds Off From SpaceX Project
- Apple Sues Apple To Start The Solar Power Project
Janelle will send you four more pages of machine-generated Slashdot headlines if you subscribe to her blog's announcement list. But after savoring the whole surreal AI-enabled look at the last 20 years, these four headlines were still my favorites:
- Red Hat Releases Linux Games And Moon
- Why Open Source Power Man Sues Java
- Microsoft Releases New Months
- Ask Slashdot: Do We Want To Be the Computers?
dlines?! That's impressive. I thought only AI could be *that* obnoxious and stupid.
...garbage out!
This is fun, I guess. I've seen other posts on this blog as well.
It's all moderately interesting, but with the best ones filtered to the top by a human, doesn't that kind of defeat the purpose?
Seems like wasted research dollars, to me.
Slashdot Media can excise the last trappings of their crappy editorbase and the level of gibberish in headlines and article synopsis' will look no different! Be sure to email Slashdot Media's parent company and voice your approval for their elimination! :)
captcha was 'adroit' :)
Come April Fools, let's separately train the AI on the previous years' April Fools' headlines, and let's see what it generates...
The difference... The AI is a teeny bit more on point..
my sig pwns your sig
"The One-Department For Alleged For Connectivity: 3-D Printed Baby"
What?
If you train your algorithm with whatever raw data, you would get whatever result. Even a model perfectly analysing the given situation becomes useless when not being adequately trained. In this specific case, the problem is clear: that tool was designed to deal with a different type of scenarios. Coming up with names for objects by training the program with many other names of equivalent objects makes perfect sense. Trying to figure out the best title for an article by analysing a big number of past titles about different subjects makes no sense at all.
The only sensible proceeding in this specific case would have been to rely on a tool able to reasonably analyse article contents and accurately determine the associated title; also to analyse a big amount of contents and output a good summary for them. You train that tool with all the articles during the last years, such that it can come up with the best summary and generate a title from that summary. If they did that, the training might have been considered acceptably good and the accuracy of the used model might have been properly assessed. Under the current conditions, these results don't differ much from the generation of random words.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
We got this one once a week
After Chess, Go and Jeopardy yet another thing is found to be better done by computers and AI software: Writing Slashdot headlines.
How about extending said AI to scour the net searching for "news for nerds, stuff that matters" and posting it's findings to Slashdot?
I suspect it may well work better than what we have now.
It is my firm belief that many of the user posts here are generated by some form of automation.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Can we also have robot "editors".
Or do we already have them ?
I Will KILL You All
Because, well, what they show is what topics really dominate on /., because what does finding the "ultimate" headline really mean? It means that it finds what terms, products, people and so on are found the most in /. headlines. It's pretty much a popularity contest. And what do we get?
Company-wise we get MS, Sun and Apple. Which makes sense. I'm glad to not see SCO anywhere anymore, that used to dominate the headlines a few years back.
People-wise all we get is Jobs. Really? He's the quintessential poster child for our headlines? Not Billy? Not Ballmer? I am not so deluded anymore that it would be Turing or someone important, but couldn't it at least be Stallman? Of all the people that shape the IT world, it really is Jobs? And that guy is dead, unlike the rest of them!
And content-wise? Lawsuits, mostly. And patents. A bit open source, a bit Star Wars, a bit trivialities. Seriously, one could think we're on a board for lawyers and law geeks, not techs.
And this, ladies and gentlemen, sums up what's wrong here.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Something didn't feel right. And the names: BeauHD, EditorDavid, msmash, whipslash! Too silly to be real persons.
Get the AI to write Slashdot comments; it'll be an improvement.
Janelle will send you four more pages of machine-generated Slashdot headlines
Thanks but no thanks. I might have found it interesting just by following links. I hate to be blackmailed into a subscription to 'view more content'. Can we please stop this narcissistic (semi-)commercial blogging trend that relies on zillions of `followers`.
Also, /. celebrating 20 years of opensource news with subscribe-walled content isn't really promising for the next 20 year.
My favourite:
U.S. Considering Death of the Solar System
I knew Trump was up to something!
There's no way any AI trained on Slashdot's history failed to produce duplicates.
Well, that seems the go-to verb in Slashdot headlines is "sue". Whether that's a comment on editorial decisions alone, or a comment on the state of the tech world, I don't know. A bit of both, I guess.
"Microsoft Releases New Months"
This isn't realistic at all - I didn't see a single duplicate story in there. Obviously the AI is keeping track of what it said before, which as we all know is not how Slashdot operates. The editors don't read their own site. Remember the last time it changed hands and the vow was no more dupes? LOL.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
That's a lot more like it..
Half-Life 2X Speed Released
it's twice as funny the second time.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
How you train this algorithm is by weighting each headline choice according to how much advertising revenue you think it will generate and then pick the highest one.
We'll make great pets
Youâ(TM)re garbage bro.
Revenue was down at Microsoft, so two new months were added to the calendar for subscribers of its Office 365 service. "I think customers will love Duodecember the most," says longtime customer Brad. "It abbreviates to Dude, and it I still get Word, Excel, and Outlook for only $6.99"
The new months were inspired by NBC's addition of Katilsday, added to the week to promote an additional episode of Dateline.
It took a while but the AI eventually sussed out its audience... 'Ask Slashdot: Do We Want To Be the Computers?'
Anyone who enjoyed this article and has ever played Magic the Gathering, may enjoy RoboRosewater, a neural network which invents a new Magic card every other day.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
This is nothing more than FakeNews designed to cover the fact that you've had mediocre AIs posing as Slashdot editors for years.
I'm not buying it.
if (TFS.includes("microsoft")){
return topic + " is a bad thing!!"
}
I thought BeauHD and others already proved Slashdot is written by AI. Well, maybe just A as the I part is debatable.
In any case, all I can say about "Steve Jobs To Be Good" is FAKE NEWS
Make it a white, lesbian AI and it could write headlines for the Huffington Post!
Seriously, that guy was awful.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
The neural network was so close to giving us "Apple Sues Sun To Start Solar Power Project".
Tons of dupes and moronic 'ask slashdot' questions that can be answered by 2 minutes of googling.
You mean AI hasn't been writing /. headlines for years already?
antipaucity
Lol. You beat me to it. ;) Seriously, though, there are legitimate uses for these algorithms. Fetishizing the technology and imagining it as a pet aren't one of them (hint: it's just an algorithm. It will only ever be an algorithm). It reminds me of the digipet craze of the nineties, or even pet rocks. It's just a rock, it shall forever be just a rock, no matter how much imagination one paints it with. Time will bear this out, and in 2027 a lot of people will feel stupid.
So, I see she used a char-based RNN, to predict the next charachter in the sequence. Scoring simply being the likelihood of the next charachter in the sequence (for n depth).
Wouldn't it make more sense to use a word based RNN, and train it against resemblance to actual slashdot headlines?
Just ideas...
Even more useful would be using a seed word -> phrase mapping/training. This again would work well with a RNN. Given seed word, predict headline.
As it is implemented in the post, it's currently just a glorified random number generator.
Looks like dead media won't have their jobs taken over any time soon.
FTFY, must have been an AI generated comment.
"But Sun Microsystems also founds its way into several headlines"
Did AI write this too?
n/c
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
FTA... over 20 years, the most likely story:
Company X Sues over thing Y.
Dupes usually have different headline though. So how do you know they wouldn't have duplicated content?
American bots write the headlines, Putin bots write the comments.
Business as usual.
This wins everything "Sun Sues New Star Trek To Stop The Math" is just perfect
Now I understand why Musk is so afraid of AI. Just think of the headlines it could create for the next election.
http://www.bbspot.com/toys/sla...
Even after all this time, it's still surprisingly good at emulating real submissions.
Palaces, barricades, threats, meet promises
Sure. And Trump is a retarded, fat faggot.
Didn't Red Hat finally release the moon after the ransom was paid? I thought I read that. Also Apple Sues Apple To Start The Solar Power Project sounds completely like something they would do.
We do want to be the computers.
That sounds like him. [paraphrased]
Next up, Trump patents chaos.
Table-ized A.I.
Isn't this how shady marketing co's generate click-bait? They use AI-ish techniques and/or humans to generate semi-random headlines from existing popular headlines and then test click responses online by embedding them in B-grade sites. Those headlines with the most clicks are fed back into the cycle to improve their click-rate.
You have old-style techniques like Markov chains to generate candidates headlines and Genetic Algorithms to cross-breed and test the candidates. Newer techniques can be added into the mix to improve the grammar and give it more options.
Hey, how about a "Slashdot Onion" section be created where readers contribute fake stories, and the most funny and/or interesting ones are voted to the top. Top reader comments and suggestions can be added to the final version. It could be a source of profits for Slashdot via ads. (Just make it clear it's satire.)
Table-ized A.I.
One of the most impressive books ever written is, IIRC, "Sun Sues: The Art of Patent War"
Ask Slashdot: Do We Want To Be the Computers?
Did you remove all of the duplicate headlines before submitting to avoid weighting certain topics too heavily? After all, Slashdot is known for news that sounds familiar.
I'm confused. So it took a bunch of existing headlines, and wrote others? I clicked hoping to read about how it took all the existing summaries and wrote new headlines. I am disappoint.
Were these headlines generated based on user news submissions? Otherwise the exercise is completely useless. The job of the AI is to turn a user submission into a headline. Not to invent a headline out of thin air. The AI should read the user submission, read all linked articles, and distil a headline from all of that information based on the patterns established over the past 20 years. It sounds like this was just a stupid mad libs generator.
Hey shut up! He's not fat!
Hey shut up! He's not fat!
Correct. He is "under-heighted".
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Twenty years - huzzah!
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
Artificial Intelligence is better than none.
I'm mildly curious what stories (and/or original headlines) go with some of these generated headlines, but I notice that neither TFA nor the TFS seems to have preserved that information.
Am I the only one wondering how this can be called AI?
Sure, it's artificial. But, how is any of this intelligent?
This is a parlor trick. Which, sadly, is what /. has become -- just another titillating tabloid.