AI has automated everything including this headline curly bracket semicolon This week's [article|column] comes to you fresh from our latest in automated journalism, The RegAIster. We hope [you|they] enjoy [it|them]. Thanks to [innovative|disruptive|fictional] technologies, it is now possible to template [news|features|columns] with tagged fields to present the [reader|commenter|aggregator] with [ …
If only the Dabbmeisters[1] powers extended to breaking YooToobe..
(Although it has to be said, Mrs COCM seems to find it useful for new sock-knitting techniques. And similer outre craft-type explorations.). What a wild and exciting life we lead.
[1] I still cringe when listening to late 80's Pendragon (but not for the reasons you think) when Nick calls the then-drummer[2] "drum-miester-general". Still, we were all young and foolish once. Some of us are no longer young.
[2] Who, in a singularly unfortunate choice of name, was called Fudge Smith. At least according to Pikiwedia - so maybe a 50% chance of being correct. And no, my memory of those days isn't as clear as it might be..
Lush:- purveyor of shopping mall smells
Or (at least to me): purveyor of 'bronchial-spasm inducing smells". One of those places that I have to hold my breath when walking past (much like the perfume counter in places like Boots or the customer services team here at 9am - before the clashing perfumes/aftershaves have had time to mellow..)
Ditto, I avoid Debenhams, because for some reason some muppet decided the best place for menswear is right next to the perfume counter where they spend all day spraying vast quantities of strong scents....
Can;t use my dentists waiting room as they insist on having several spraying air freshners set to the most frequent spray interval in a room with no ventilation and no bigger than my kitchen (which barely bypasses "broom closet" - they get miffed when I tell them I can't use their waiting room - But we need to keep it smelling "fresh" - open a fooking window then.....not like the room doesn't have a massive one
@Semtex451
Point taken, however, making MadLibs isn't hard, even for a computer|Ai|Bi|BS! ok, I get it, as humans, we can remove adjectives(stupid fecking name for a word) from a sentence and insert another really funny|appropriate|timely adnoun{see better}{ref adverb}{def~modifying a noun}
Wow this is really fun|annoying|AI
More likely their perception of computers hasn't moved on since the days when error messages were all in uppercase. Not because programmers liked to shout at you but because they had to compress all text and all uppers saved a bit in every byte.
Some youngsters think it is fake news but once upon a time PCs had less than 1 M of memory. Yes M not G.
My honours supervisor had a 516k Mac which had been upgraded to 1M. It had a 1M external which it sat on. The Department had a LISA as well. We were the first honours class to do our theses entirely in silico (before being printed out).
My PhD thesis broke new ground: double sided printing.
For a hilarious (and very early - 1965), representation of AI in journalism and elsewhere, I recommend The Tin Men by Michael Frayn.
To quote the blurb:
Why not program computers to take over the really dull jobs that human beings have to do - such as praying and behaving morally? At the William Morris Institute of Automation Research they are doing just that.
A friend of mine worked in the newsroom at a large regional radio station. One Monday he was compiling bulletins which would include reports from the previous Saturday's football. In error, he copied in a manager interview from a game that had taken place weeks previously, and that ran on air , every hour all day. Not a single person noticed.
Just goes to show that at the end of the day, it's a game of two halves and if the boys do good then the other team are going home sick as a parrot.
Tony Hillerman, of Navajo mystery stories fame, wrote an early novel featuring a journalist covering state politics in the US. To make deadline, the journalist would routinely write up the result of a vote before it actually occurred, confident that he knew what the outcome would be.
I primed GPT-2 (via https://talktotransformer.com) with some IT related text and it came back with this.
Priming string: "We need to reboot one of our file servers to help the below issue. All file shares will be offline for around 15 minutes from 9.35am. Please save and close any files."
Response:
"In addition to these issues this morning, an internet service issue, which had been causing the file servers to go offline also caused them to go grey again.
All file shares are expected to be available by 3.30pm.
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I think that having my local newspaper company* employ AI technology couldn't make their reporting any worse than it already is - which is to say that it often reads like it's been composed by a nine-year-old and is guaranteed to contain typos that any wordprocessor will highlight without any difficulty.
*Archant, if you must know.
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