Wednesday, September 30, 2020
gniruT tseT
AI point-missing at MindMatters as usual.
The article is trying to show that a good novelist can create an entire character in a few words, which no AI-generated text can possibly do. This should be a pretty good Turing-ish test. Good authors can certainly accomplish this task, but the chosen example shows the exact opposite.
Example from Flannery O'Connor:
He kept on digging but the grave did not get any deeper. "The dead are poor," he said in the voice of the stranger. "You can’t be any poorer than dead."No actual human ever said those words. No actual human COULD say those words. The paragraph sounds exactly like the output of a badly configured AI story-generator. Without the author's name, this would instantly fall on the machine side of a Turing test. Here's a more useful example from another Southern writer, TR Pearson, in exactly the same gravedigging scene.
Mrs Ida Dinkins McCoy 1904-1967 Gone to God had plastic jonquils and bows at her feet and a gilt-framed picture of herself embedded in her headstone. Apparently Mrs Ida Dinkins McCoy had not made her way in the world on account of her good looks.SES. Tells you all you need to know about Mrs McCoy in one sentence. Only a human can understand the laconic negated subjunctive of the sentence. We instantly form an image of how Mrs McCoy's life would have gone if she had been blessed with good looks; and then we negate the image.
Labels: AI point-missing, SES
¶ 2:45 PM
