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Google Trains AI To Write Wikipedia Articles (theregister.co.uk)
The Register: A team within Google Brain -- the web giant's crack machine-learning research lab -- has taught software to generate Wikipedia-style articles by summarizing information on web pages... to varying degrees of success. As we all know, the internet is a never ending pile of articles, social media posts, memes, joy, hate, and blogs. It's impossible to read and keep up with everything. Using AI to tell pictures of dogs and cats apart is cute and all, but if such computers could condense information down into useful snippets, that would be really be handy. It's not easy, though. A paper, out last month and just accepted for this year's International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) in April, describes just how difficult text summarization really is. A few companies have had a crack at it. Salesforce trained a recurrent neural network with reinforcement learning to take information and retell it in a nutshell, and the results weren't bad.
Such models have no common sense yet - can't tell if "the use of the umbrella causes the rain or the other way around". They can't think like us, they just copy text and try to hit all the sub-topics with naturally sounding language based on the source material. It's more similar to Google translator than a human Wikipedia editor.
Most articles I find on the net follow a pretty consistent pattern, using one of two variations on that pattern:
How To Foo a Fizz
Fizz s very popular these days blah blah. First paragraph says nothing useful at all.
Fizz is good for blah blah. Second paragraph also pointless.
Sometimes it helps to Foo your Fizz. Some people like to Foo it because blah blah blah.
You can Foo your Fizz by:
Clicking the tiny menu at the bottom
Choose Preferences
Select "Foo"
Now your Fizz is Foo and blah blah blah.
Share this on Facebook. On Twitter. On Google Plus. MySpace. Yourspace. Farmers only . Black people meet. Stupid people meet.
Pretty standard pattern. The first two or three paragraphs are pointless. Sometimes they forget to actually tell you how to do it, and ONLY have the fluff. That's really annoying.
The "human interest" version is similar:
How to Close a Resume Cover Letter
Debbie Wood, a mother of two from Englewood, Colorado was driving home in her blue Mustang when she stopped for some fries. After eating them, with ketchup, she got a call saying she was fired. Blah blah blah.
Blah blah blah about Debbie.
Debbie worked at Poor Writing Inc for six years, starting out as an eraser. Blah blah blah.
Debbie wrote "I'm looking forward to hearing from you" at the end of her cover letter. It worked great.
Debbie now works at blah blah blah. She enjoys blah at her blah job blah blah blah.
Share this on Facebook. On Twitter. On Google Plus. MySpace. Yourspace. Farmers only . Black people meet. Stupid people meet.
Pretty much the entire useful part of the story is the fourth paragraph.