The rise of robot authors: is the writing on the wall for human novelists?

Artificial intelligence can now write fiction and journalism. But does it measure up to George Orwell – and can it report on Brexit?Will androids write novels about electric sheep? The dream, or nightmare, of totally machine-generated prose seemed to have come one step closer with the recent announcement of an artificial intelligence that could produce, all by itself, plausible news stories or fiction. It was the brainchild of OpenAI – a nonprofit lab backed by Elon Musk and other tech entrepreneurs – which slyly alarmed the literati by announcing that the AI (called GPT2) was too dangerous for them to release into the wild, because it could be employed to create “deepfakes for text”. “Due to our concerns about malicious applications of the technology,” they said, “we are not releasing the trained model.” Are machine-learning entities going to be the new weapons of information terrorism, or will they just put humble midlist novelists out of business?Let’s first take a step back. AI has been the next big thing for so long that it’s easy to assume “artificial intelligence” now exists. It doesn’t, if by “intelligence” we mean what we sometimes encounter in our fellow humans. GPT2 is just using methods of statistical analysis, trained on huge amounts of human-written text – 40GB of web pages, in this case, that received recommendations from Reddit readers – to predict what ought to come next. This probabilistic approach is how Google Translate works, and also the method... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'

[ The Guardian | 2019-03-25 00:00:00 UTC ]
News tagged with: #big thing #statistical analysis #web pages

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Quick Look: iBooks Author

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[ Betanews | 2012-01-20 00:00:00 UTC ]
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iBooks Author Offers Free E-Textbook Creation

iBooks Author is a free Mac app designed to let authors and publishers easily create multimedia-rich e-textbooks for the iBooks 2 app. Continue reading at PC World

[ PC World | 2012-01-19 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Apple reveals education trifecta: iBooks 2, iBooks Author, and iTunes U

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[ Betanews | 2012-01-19 00:00:00 UTC ]
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BA asks local authorities for tax cuts

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[ The Bookseller | 2012-01-18 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Turning Up the Volume on Author Podcasts

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[ Publishers Weekly | 2012-01-13 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Random House Group UK to tout authors as speakers

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[ The Bookseller | 2012-01-13 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Media Decoder: Author Found on Penguin's Web Site Signs Book Deal

An imprint of Penguin Group USA discovered Kerry Schafer after she posted samples on Bookcountry.com, a site that lets writers share their work. Continue reading at The New York Times

[ The New York Times | 2012-01-09 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Orbit buys new Humanity's Fire novel

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[ The Bookseller | 2012-01-09 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Tamarind: 'more multicultural writing needed'

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[ The Bookseller | 2012-01-09 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Angry Robot moves into crime

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[ The Bookseller | 2012-01-09 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Printed book sales fall as Christmas digital sales rise

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[ The Bookseller | 2012-01-04 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Wimpy Kid author files lawsuit against Zombie Kid publisher

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[ The Bookseller | 2011-12-22 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Faceless net giants writing own rule books

Businesses have little recourse - or human contact - when resolving disputes with Google or Facebook, write Julian Lee and Ben Grubb. Continue reading at The Sydney Morning Herald

[ The Sydney Morning Herald | 2011-12-19 00:00:00 UTC ]
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