Originally published at: MSN declared former NBA star Brandon Hunter "Useless at 42" in bizarre AI-written obituary | Boing Boing
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AI articles really need to be taken through gates and filters for improvement. But that journey must include a garbage can.
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so “Story by Editor” byline was a bit of an exaggeration then? what a terrible thing to get published. i hope none of his friends or family saw it.
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A good reminder of why you never ever put your goddamn name (even by implication) on anything that you didn’t take the time to read, let alone write.
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I got him beat, I was useless at 22.
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It wasn’t even an “AI written” obituary. It was literally a copy-paste of TMZ’s obituary, then seemingly run through a thesaurus to switch out words at random to make it appear different.
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That’s largely how AI “writing” works. It finds existing writing on the subject and goes from there. I’m oversimplifying, but that’s the general idea.
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AFAIK plagiarism with word substitution is a separate content mill technique unrelated to large language models or anything else that is referred to as AI.
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What does AI do when there is not a broad database of information to draw from though? If the TMZ obit was the only article on the topic the AI software had to go on wouldn’t the result look a lot like something processed through some kind of word substitution algorithm?
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I thought editors went away a long time ago, based on the rising rates of grammatical and spelling errors.
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Well, to be fair, terrible as it is, a dead basketball player is pretty useless to his team.
I’m assuming the “Editor” is an AI.
I wonder if they weren’t using multiple techniques - i.e. some sort of automated system wrote the headline, scraped the text and chose the thesaurus system for the content, because I don’t see how either a human editor nor a thesaurus text-replacement comes up with “useless.”
An obit has a pretty standard form, so it should be able to manage reiterating the same basic information, albeit in a new form that was meandering and full of writing clichés (and potentially really weird digressions).
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This is exactly what I was thinking happened.
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Hah, that’s a rookie number. I was born useless.
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I think that kind of plagiarism is called “spinning”, and the software for it is a spinner. There are a few of them available online, so if you want a really incomprehensible essay, just chain them together!
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