The reason why I wrote this post is as follows. I saw lot of discussions and flag wars on steemit. I have my opinion what is going on here but I don't want to be involved in politics. What I want to talk about is one of the weapons used in this war. This is more interesting topic in general. This topic is the content produced by AI.
Warning
This post is for people who are not familiar or don't understand whole thing. Is it even possible that program will produce the content? What is the quality of the content and how we can recognize this type of “spam”? I will try to answer these questions by very simple way. For those who are really afraid of AI spam or spam in general I can recommend my previous article about life-cycle of the spam.
Lifecycle of spam on Steemit - Quantitative analysis
For the record. I was not familiar with problematic of Artificial intelligent and machine learning before I joined my current job. I still don't understand the deep details. The good thing is that I have a chance to ask people around me. I did ask one of my colleagues and he explained me those things around content created by AI in simplest possible way.
There is nothing to worry about
I saw the discussion about “future of AI on Steemit”. The future of AI on steemit is not a thing we should worry about. There are plenty of other problems to solve before Steemit become interesting place for AI. Yes, there is some possibility that you can find some of the articles written by AI but those articles are rare and what is more important these articles are only low quality spam. ( I am sorry guys)
So first important thing is to realize that spam can be produced by algorithm. The reason why is algorithmic spam so popular is that regular human spamming is very time consuming activity. The fact is that algorithmic spam mostly exists only for this reason. We can find two major types of spam. Let's call it a simple and an advanced type of spam.
The simple spam - (collecting and combining)
The algorithm needs to find massive sample of data. For example tons of articles about topics as “Love, Money, Sport, Relationship etc. Then it will pick small parts of those data to combine them to the “original“ article. This is not even AI. This is just different way of copy-pasting. Frankly, nothing to be proud of.
The advanced spam - (AI based on machine learning)
AI can definitely learn how to write an article. What is more interesting is that algorithm can also learn how to copy the style of writing of particular author. I want to assure you that if you are really good content creator, that you have nothing to be afraid of. This algorithms uses most common sentences to combine them to simple content. This is all what algorithm can do. Don't expect any serious articles about research or posts full of creativity. The algorithms can not learn these stuff. The biggest problem for those algorithms is to keep main idea in whole post from beginning to the end. The funny thing is that you can find almost all of these articles created by AI very easily by similar AI which can recognize them as a spam. At the end of the day, problem is solved.
I have mentioned that AI can also learn how to copy a style of writing. Yes this is possible. I saw an algorithm which have learned how to write the same way as a Shakespeare. The interesting thing is that people who are passionate by AI takes this as a sort of art :). It is funny, isn't it ?. In my opinion, this could be taken as a sort of art.
The one thing I am sure about is if someone will post the article with sign “The content created by AI“ then people will appreciate an effort. For ordinary people who don't even know how these things work could be very interesting, I guess. I bet you that author of the algorithm will get much more respect and higher rewards in long term because this is really something to be proud of. The author could be respected at least from IT community and he can do what he is good at. He can write about things behind the machine learning and other related stuff. As I said before, let's take Steemit as a knowledge base.
What do you think about it ?
This post was created by simple human for simple humans to better understand what the possibilities of AI writing are. If you think this explanation is simplest and most stupid way how to introduce AI, then you are right. That was a plan. :)
Simplistic "AI" that posts the output of a markov chain is not true AI. What are your thoughts on content that is produced by AIs backed with actual knowledge representation and discourse analysis fed into natural language generation algorithms?