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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.
Obligatory XKCD Reference: https://xkcd.com/810/
It might be fun to watch the Google Wikipedia AI Bot get into "turf wars" with existing Wikipedia Bots...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Can this bot win edit wars, get Wikipedia administrators to side with it, drive n00bs off its pages? Without that, it's not very useful on Wikipedia itself.
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.
Great. Just what we need. A trained monkey that summarizes the summarizers.
According the the article, "The generated sentences are taken from the earlier extraction phase and aren’t built from scratch, which explains why the structure is pretty repetitive and stiff."
Mohammad Saleh, co-author of the paper and a software engineer in Google AI’s team, told The Register: “The extraction phase is a bottleneck that determines which parts of the input will be fed to the abstraction stage. Ideally, we would like to pass all the input from reference documents. “Designing models and hardware that can support longer input sequences is currently an active area of research that can alleviate these limitations. We are still a very long way off from effective text summarization or generation. And while the Google Brain project is rather interesting, it would probably be unwise to use a system like this to automatically generate Wikipedia entries. For now, anyway.
Also, since it relies on the popularity of the first ten websites on the internet for any particular topic, if those sites aren’t particularly credible, the resulting handiwork probably won’t be very accurate either.
My faux outrage is entirely synthetic.
This is just crying out to be applied to some famous texts to amuse us with what it comes up with.
The Hunting of the Snark. Fox in Socks. We're Going on a Bear Hunt. Ulysses. 50 Shades of Grey. Titus Andronicus. Sonnet 130. Harry Potter and the Portrait of What Looked Like a Large Pile of Ash. The Magna Carta. Genesis. Terms and Conditions for iTunes.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
I didn't realise there is a Google Trains subsidiary. But even so, why does it have an AI and why would this AI edit Wikipedia?
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap