[Scaevolus]

Markov-chain generators are extremely lacking in long-term coherency. They rarely even make complete sentences, much less stay on topic! They were not convincing at all-- and many of the GPT-2 samples are as "human-like" as average internet comments.

Conjecture: GPT-2 trained on reddit comments could pass a "comment turing test", where the average person couldn't distinguish whether a comment is bot or human with better than, say, 60% accuracy.

[pishpash]

That's an indictment of reddit comments more than AI. Remember that conditioned on the human-provided seed prompt, there is no statistical surprise (the definition of information) in the generated text. If all reddit comments are are riffs on the OP based on second-hand information, well then they may as well be bot-generated already.

At this stage, these AI's can only help. Imagine we are given this tool that can generate samples from the "uninformative but realistic looking text" distribution, we can then put it in a discriminator to filter out blabbering bots and humans together, or invert it to summarize the small kernel of information, and that would be a great thing. The better these models learn about typical human behavior the better off we are at identifying the truly exceptional. It's when AI starts to sense and incorporate novel information from the non-human environment that you really have to worry.

[solveit]

>That's an indictment of reddit comments more than AI.

Perhaps, but that's the world we live in. I suspect the average reddit commenter is already more articulate than the average person (citation needed, I know. But reddit skews highly educated young male in a first-world country. There's no way they do worse than a worldwide average).

Other than that, I agree with your comment.

[pas]

I know they are extremely lacking, but compared to that a hyper-fancy NN with layers and layers of the darkest of black magic, trained at the zenith of the night for thousands of man years in the crypts of the terror itself, the TPU ... yeah, so it's not surprising it's better.

But it's no symbolic reasoning. It's not constructing a counter-argument from your argument. It simply lives off previous epic rap battles of internet flamewar history about .. well, about anything, since it's the Internet, and people like to chat, talk, write essays on every topic there is. Satire too. So there is always something to build that lang model on.

Though that will come too. Eventually.