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.

Comments

Obligatory

[darkain]

Obligatory XKCD Reference: https://xkcd.com/810/

Turf Wars

[Frosty Piss]

It might be fun to watch the Google Wikipedia AI Bot get into "turf wars" with existing Wikipedia Bots...

Can't do causal and counterfactual reasoning

[Visarga]

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.

Try it on some famous works

[Michael Woodhams]

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.