AI Site Claims Simulated Conversations With Famous Dead Scientists (aiwriter.app) 32
Slashdot reader shirappu writes:
AI|Writer is an experiment in which artificial intelligence is used to simulate both real and fictitious famous personalities through written correspondence. Users can ask questions and receive explanations from simulated versions of Isaac Newton, Alfred Hitchcock, Marie Curie, Mary Shelley, and many more.
The Next Web calls it "a new experiment by magician and novelist Andrew Mayne," pointing out that it's using OpenAI's new text generator API. Other simulated conversations include Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing, Stephen Hawking, Richard Feynman, Isaac Asimov, Benjamin Franklin, and even Edgar Allen Poe.
"We have all kinds of theoretical ideas about AI and what counts as real or not," Mayne said on Twitter, "however I think you just have to be pragmatic and just ask: What can it do? I think this gets lost in a lot of discussions about AI. The end goal isn't a witty chatbot. It's to expand our knowledge."
There's a wait list for access to the site "so we can make sure everything works right and we don't accidentally create Skynet," Mayne jokes on Twitter. But assuming this isn't another magic trick, The Next Web is already reporting on some of the early results: The system first works out the purpose of the message and the intended recipient by searching for patterns in the text. It then uses the API's internal knowledge of that person to guess how they would respond in their written voice. The digitized characters can answer questions about their work, explain scientific theories, or offer their opinions. For example, Marie Curie gave a lesson on radiation, H.G. Wells revealed his inspiration for The Time Machine, while Alfred Hitchcock compared Christopher Nolan's Interstellar to Stanley Kubrick's 2001...
The characters could also compare their own eras with the present day... Mayne says the characters did well with historical facts, but could be "quite erratic with matters of opinion" and "rarely reply to the same question in the same way." He demonstrated these variations by asking both Newton and Gottfried Leibniz who invented calculus. "Newton almost always insists that he invented Calculus alone and is pretty brusque about it," Mayne wrote on his website. "Leibniz sometimes says he did. Other times he'll be vague." At one point, Leibniz even threatened to kill Mayne if he tried to take the credit for the discovery.
As well as historical figures, the system can respond in the voice of fictional characters. In fact, Mayne says the most "touching" message he's received was this reply from the Incredible Hulk.
Another conversation shows Bruce Wayne's response when asked to make a donation to support freeing the Joker...
The Next Web calls it "a new experiment by magician and novelist Andrew Mayne," pointing out that it's using OpenAI's new text generator API. Other simulated conversations include Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing, Stephen Hawking, Richard Feynman, Isaac Asimov, Benjamin Franklin, and even Edgar Allen Poe.
"We have all kinds of theoretical ideas about AI and what counts as real or not," Mayne said on Twitter, "however I think you just have to be pragmatic and just ask: What can it do? I think this gets lost in a lot of discussions about AI. The end goal isn't a witty chatbot. It's to expand our knowledge."
There's a wait list for access to the site "so we can make sure everything works right and we don't accidentally create Skynet," Mayne jokes on Twitter. But assuming this isn't another magic trick, The Next Web is already reporting on some of the early results: The system first works out the purpose of the message and the intended recipient by searching for patterns in the text. It then uses the API's internal knowledge of that person to guess how they would respond in their written voice. The digitized characters can answer questions about their work, explain scientific theories, or offer their opinions. For example, Marie Curie gave a lesson on radiation, H.G. Wells revealed his inspiration for The Time Machine, while Alfred Hitchcock compared Christopher Nolan's Interstellar to Stanley Kubrick's 2001...
The characters could also compare their own eras with the present day... Mayne says the characters did well with historical facts, but could be "quite erratic with matters of opinion" and "rarely reply to the same question in the same way." He demonstrated these variations by asking both Newton and Gottfried Leibniz who invented calculus. "Newton almost always insists that he invented Calculus alone and is pretty brusque about it," Mayne wrote on his website. "Leibniz sometimes says he did. Other times he'll be vague." At one point, Leibniz even threatened to kill Mayne if he tried to take the credit for the discovery.
As well as historical figures, the system can respond in the voice of fictional characters. In fact, Mayne says the most "touching" message he's received was this reply from the Incredible Hulk.
Another conversation shows Bruce Wayne's response when asked to make a donation to support freeing the Joker...
Not in that much of a hurry (Score:3)
I'd wait to have actual conversations with them directly.
Re: (Score:2)
Um, how if they are dead? In the afterlife? :P
Re: (Score:2)
Of course.
Petition to free the Joker? (Score:2)
Based on the hundreds of comic books, movies and TV shows that I've seen with the Joker it can be assumed that he can free himself.
Don't bother Mr. Wayne with certainties.
LOL (Score:2)
"I'd like to chat with Isaac Asimov"
Asimov: "Hello"
Me: "How do you feel about the creators of Westworld trying to Game of Thrones your Foundation series?"
Asimov: "How does it make you feel the my Foundation Series is being Game of Thrones'd"?
Me: "Eliza?"
Asimov: "Shh..."
No way to validate (Score:2)
I am taking it too seriously of course, but unless it is using a pre-existing exact reply to a previously asked exact question, how can it even be validated when none of the people are alive? And even with pre-existing questions/answers, the year/season of response and mood of the person may affect the answer. Someone answering a question in 2020 won't answer the same way as in 2019.
Re: (Score:2)
I take it back that there's no way to validate. They can validate it if they show that they can use texts and other existing resources/works to simulate existing people and then cross-check those answers with reponses of the person by asking her the same questions around the same time. If they validate it that way with thousands of people and then show they have access to equivalent amounts of text by a someone who isn't around then I guess that could be close enough to validation.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
how can it even be validated when none of the people are alive?
How much validation do you need for a PR gimmick?
oh ffs (Score:2)
this is about as credible as the love testing machines [wikipedia.org] of old days. way to go, they trained GPT-2 to correspondence of famous scientists. much sciencey, so legit.
Odd first thing to come to mind was (Score:2)
Just my 2 cents
COSMOS (Score:2)
So...straight out of COSMOS: Possible Worlds, Episode 13 -- Seven Wonders of the New World?
https://www.thetvdb.com/series/cosmos-a-spacetime-odyssey/episodes/7681315 [thetvdb.com]
Re: (Score:2)
So, fantasy.
Yes, and? (Score:2)
If the results are better than word salad it probably isn't just a baby's first Markov Chains tech demo; but unless I'm missing something notable here an 'AI' that is specifically constrained to well-known people with a well known and well documented context to train against is vastly less interesting(as an AI, perhaps more entertaining as a conversat
Re: (Score:2)
Well, once you get this working right, you train it against multiple folks at once. E.g. "J. Albert Bachstein".
That said, I don't believe it *could* work. Written works don't reflect the stream of consciousness...not even "Finnegan's Wake". Joyce went back and repolished just about every word in that over a period of, I think it was, seven years. The original public title was "Work In Progress".
Re: (Score:2)
they all fall back on a corpus though. in my opinion, a corpus corresponding to a specific person or group is more interesting than one trained on wikipedia or reddit. speaking of the latter, there's a hilarious subreddit where bots trained to specific other subreddits carry on conversations: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSi... [reddit.com]
it's all statistical or heuristic trickery at the end of the day.
A very important question to ask (Score:2)
Has anyone asked MeatloafBot just what it is he wouldn't do for love?
Re: (Score:2)
Not that.
As it turns out, MeatloafBot is a single-line BASH script and makes Eliza look like advanced AI in comparison.
Re: (Score:2)
Baby baby let me sleep on it [greekreporter.com]
AI is a watered down term (Score:1)
AI is a term that is used for something as simple as a bunch of RND statements, with branches depending on user input. It's also a cheap marketing buzzword.
I think it's time for new terms for different levels of "AI", because as it stands, "AI" has been watered down to the point of almost being meaningless.
Re: (Score:2)
This is just PR then? (Score:2)
A novelist was involved? So, I'm guessing if I asked Leibniz to explain a windowless monad to me, it wouldn't be able to do it.
Re: (Score:2)
That's probably an incorrect assumption. Leibniz wrote lots about monads, so it's there to train the program. But if you asked it "What purpose does the concept of monad serve?" it might have a bit of difficulty. (I kept going to sleep when trying to read that stuff, so perhaps he did say. Perhaps it was the translator, of course. [Also that was multiple decades ago...but gods! he could go on about monads.])
Re: (Score:1)
Awesome... (Score:1)
So we have Eliza that does a pale, stereotypical one-dimentional impression of famous dead people. Ho-hum.
Let me know when this can produce a video rendering of Albert Einstein regurgitating grade school level penis jokes.
Ah, the good old days... (Score:3)
I fondly remember Forum 2000 [slashdot.org], which used a much older form [andrej.com] of AI to produce a similar effect.
Re: (Score:2)
Yellow double-dome (Score:2)
The famous scientist I would most like to have a conversation with is Augustus Owsley Stanley III
How dumb do you have to be to be fooled? (Score:2)
I guess anybody that had some real understanding who these people were does already not qualify.
Simulated Conversations With Famous Dead Scientist (Score:3)
And for that matter, let's then have them chat with each other to find out which is the real one and which is the fake -- a proper Turing test, indeed!
Lol it doesn't work (Score:1)
Technology (Score:1)