When an AI Tries Writing Slashdot Headlines (tumblr.com)

For Slashdot's 20th anniversary, "What could be geekier than celebrating with the help of an open-source neural network?" Neural network hobbyist Janelle Shane has already used machine learning to generate names for paint colors, guinea pigs, heavy metal bands, and even craft beers, she explains on her blog. "Slashdot sent me a list of all the headlines they've ever run, over 162,000 in all, and asked me to train a neural network to try to generate more." Could she distill 20 years of news -- all of humanity's greatest technological advancements -- down to a few quintessential words?

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?

Comments

Meh

[enigma32]

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.

April Fools' Day

[vasilevich]

Come April Fools, let's separately train the AI on the previous years' April Fools' headlines, and let's see what it generates...

Re:3D-printed baby?

[Rei]

Some are actually unintentionally insightful. I love "Security Hole For Security Hole" - I've seen that one way too many times in real life. ;)
"Black Hole Proposed" - Yep, been at meetings like that at work as well ;)
"Building a Top 100 Company For Mars" - I think Musk wrote that one ;)
"Computer Computer Computer Computer Software" sounds like a Balmer speech.
"Scientists Discover Free Wi-Fi Store In the US" sounds like The Onion.
"Microsoft Slashdot: How To Build a Bad Privacy For Windows 10" - Done and done.
"IBM Moves to The Matrix" - Also happened long ago.
"Ask Slashdot: Do We Want To Be the Computers?" - Yes. Yes we do.

The winning verb is: sue

[malx]

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.