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.
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.
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.
And even a poorly trained AI could see it's bollocks.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
Get the AI to write Slashdot comments; it'll be an improvement.
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!
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
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.
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!!"
}
Seriously, that guy was awful.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
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
... when you forget to login.
What are those screwy 'â' things for? Are you trying to be edgy?
Likely it's the "curly quote"... which only brings up more questions. Did this user type their response into Word and copy-paste it into slashdot? Before you say "Nobody would ever do that"..... walk a few years in my life. Observe others... The doc says so long as I stop asking "Why?" the anyurisms will likely stay away.
n/c
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Dupes usually have different headline though. So how do you know they wouldn't have duplicated content?
Sure, it would be more useful. But that would require programming. There are already ready-made libraries out there for predictive text for touch keyboards and so on.
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
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.
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.
Ask Slashdot: Do We Want To Be the Computers?
LOL if you thought the problem was the handling of ASCII then you should have just given up, seen his 4 digits, and stayed off the lawn.
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.
Duplicates should be included so as to train the AI to recognize them and prevent them from being posted in the first place. Now that would be useful!
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.
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.