Maggie, Why do all the links in your posts direct to the discussion board rather than the source material? I see the correct links when clicking âShow Full Postâ from the forum, but not on the main page.
Iâve come across this too, itâs very annoying.
Thereâs a glitch with one of our posting categories, but itâs a known problem and Iâm not using that category anymore. Itâs not being used here. And, as far as I can tell, this post is not doing that. At least not from my Chrome browser on a Mac. Are you getting different results?
It got fixed after I posted, I assumed in response. Firefox on Win7, for what itâs worth.
arenât there somewhat reliable algorithms for detecting the gender of authors?
Though in this case, the man is required to imagine what it would be like to be a woman, and construct an identity based on that cognitive model, while the computer can be preprogrammed to respond like a lady-- no cognitive model of âthe other sexâ is required.
How is it a glitch? Isnât that where âdiscussâ (instead of âread the restâ) implies it will go?
It just occurred to me to wonder why Turing didnât generalize more. What if a human and a computer pretend to be computers? What if a woman tried to sound like a man?
Iâm willing to bet the results of actual experiments would be very interesting.
The way I hear it, Turing believed that a truly masculine man, such as himself, had no need for women, and so imitating women was akin to a parlor game, rather than a serious understanding of the human psyche,
So thatâs what the internet in the early 00s was about. Just a bunch of guys practicing for the Turing Test.
I think the claim that Turingâs original proposal was that âA man and a computer compete to see who is better at pretending to be a womanâ is a misreading. If you look at the original paper, Turing first presents a scenario where you have two people âa man (A), a woman (B)â, both trying to convince an interrogator © that they are woman. It seems to me that this example is just brought up to illustrate the idea of someone trying to convince an interrogator that they are something they are not, in a conventional scenario involving two humans (and gender is one of the more obvious ways in which humans can differ). Turing then says:
We now ask the question, âWhat will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game?â Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman?
I feel fairly certain that Turing was merely making an analogy to the original imitation game, in effect saying âwhat if the same sort of game was played, except in this case instead of A being a man falsely pretending to be a woman, A is a machine falsely pretending to be a human?â (I think weâre all familiar with the looseness of how analogical phrases like ânow imagine the same thing, exceptâŠâ are used in everyday speech.) I donât think the intention was that it was meant to be exactly the same game, including the fact that the machine was trying to convince the interrogator it was a woman. Just look at the questions Turing imagines asking A, which have nothing to do with gender and instead have to do with tasks we conventionally imagine humans being better at than machines or vice versa, like writing sonnets and quickly figuring out winning chess moves. Likewise notice where Turing talks about covering the machine with realistic artificial skin, and says even supposing this invention available we should feel there was little point in trying to make a âthinking machineâ more human by dressing it up in such artificial fleshâhe says âmore humanâ (indicating that the machine is trying to trick the interrogator into thinking itâs a human), not âmore like a womanâ.
Not that link - the link in the body of the post that should (and now does) refer to the source article.
I can imagine that pretending to be a woman might have felt emotionally significant to Turing, considering his struggles as a gay man living in a culture that doubted his masculinity, and eventually murdered him by forcing him to take female hormones. I donât suppose he thought about this consciously, but it seems meaningful that he chose that particular challenge for his test.
Why would Turing pretend to be a woman?
That depends on what you mean by âsomewhat reliableâ. Last I checked they existed but were pretty unimpressive. For classifiers like that there is a rather sunstantial range of performances where they work better than chance allows, but they are still useless for anything practical. Some systems are also awfully sensitive to any kind of imbalance in the source material (domain, text length, registerâŠ)
I guess theyâre reliable in the sense that whenever I plug my own work into them, Iâm invariably rated as male. I was often told that I âtype like a manâ, and apparently that is true. Even a short story I wrote about a woman reminiscing about her childhood, with entirely female pronouns, came back as âstrongly maleâ.
What Iâm saying is that I am a ladyperson and I donât think they work.
There are two ways of solving the problem:
Speak like a human + speak like a woman
I think weâre quite close to solving the second par of the problem. The problem is getting the program to converse as if it was human. Once you do that it should be a simple matter of biasing the subject matter and vocabulary enough to produce the desired effect.
Speak like a human + understand what makes women different then men in order to mimic a women
And that understanding might be closer to our conception of intelligence than the first strategy, or the conventional Turing Test,
I get the same results; every email, blog post or short story I feed in there comes out as âmaleâ (or in a couple of cases âWeak Maleâ whatever thatâs supposed to mean).
I think itâs still largely based on stereotyping and cultural constructs of how women and men typically communicate, not yet another proof that males and females are oh so innately different. Then again, any tool, survey or study yielding the results that women/men responded stereotypically above chance elicit the belief that male/females are fundamentally different, even though a large number of people did not respond stereotypically (but are usually ignored or explained away). From the gender guessing program itself, I find several clarifications annoying:
The content, knowledge of the material, age of the author, nationality, experience, occupation, and education level can all impact writing styles.For example, a woman who has spent 20 years working in a male-dominated field may write like her co-workers. Similarly, professional female writers (and experienced hobbyists) frequently use male writing styles.Gender Guesser does not take any of these factors into account.
So a woman hanging out with and accepted by men ends up having writings that masquerade as a maleâs. It is not that females can innately write in any form, genre or style whatsoever based on their own interests and personality (or vice-versa for males). Itâs also not that itâs silly to assign male/femaleness to genres and subjects in the first place beyond already-established stereotypes and tradition.
Also (emphasis added):
While Gender Guesser may be 60% - 70% accurate, it is not 100% accurate.This is better than random guessing (50%), but should not be interpreted as âfactâ. In particular, men should not be offended if it says you write like a girl.
In order to reassure the unfortunate men who may be compared to a âgirlâ, they basically admit that their doodad- and its results- is actually, probably flawed and will often guess wrong. Because who wants to turn out writing like a female, or (worse/better?) a Weak Male!
With this in mind, such efforts donât say anything about innate gender differences or writing but a lot about deeply ingrained, cultural and traditional stereotypes.
With this in mind, such efforts donât say anything about innate gender differences or writing but a lot about deeply ingrained, cultural and traditional stereotypes.
And the imitation game doesnât?
You said all of that WAY better than I did. I didnât spend 20 years hanging out in a male-dominated field, thatâs just how I write. How Iâve always written. I read everything and Iâm often influenced by the style of whoever I was reading last, but I donât always even know the gender of the author (I didnât realize James Tiptree Jr. was a woman until about 5 years ago).
I was just talking about the same thing on another forum, and I plugged the post I made about the gender guesser into it. Yup, male again. This post gave me a formal writing score of male, and an informal of weakly female. When I added that sentence about my score, it changed entirely to male.
