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AI

AI-Generated New Year's Resolutions Exhibited by the Smithsonian (msn.com) 36

Posted by EditorDavid from the making-a-suggestion dept.
The Washington Post says that when it comes to making New Year's resolutions, the Smithsonian has a better idea. "What if instead of relying on our own resolutions we asked an AI what it thinks we should do?" Starting this weekend, the "Futures" exhibit both online and at its Arts and Industries Building offers a "Resolutions Generator," an AI that makes suggestions on what commitments we should undertake for 2022.... It sounds like a slightly weird idea, and I'd be lying if I said it didn't turn up some weird results. "Change my name to one of my favorite shapes," it suggests, or "Every Friday for a year I will wear a different hat." And, "Every time I hear bells for a month, I will paint a potato."

Designed by AI researcher-writer Janelle Shane, the generator's odd results are deliberate; she purposely trained the AI (the powerful GPT-3) with some of the wackier resolutions humans have put online, then set its parameters wide. "We wanted the AI to come up with the kind of interesting resolutions we're not thinking of," Shane said. "We wanted whimsy," added Rachel Goslins, the director of the Arts and Industries Building, "with a little bit of real."

Okay, so probably not many people will really "Go into a library, climb up onto a shelf, yell down 'I am a giant giraffe!'" But it's a lot easier than trying to lose those 15 pounds. And this way you end up in a library.

Plus they have a point. The truth is by accessing the collective corpus of human resolutions, AI might conceive of ideas that our pale human pea brains cannot... [T]here are growing piles of evidence that deploying AI that can think faster and even differently will pay dividends in the real world. A Stanford study last month concluded that AI sped up discoveries on coronavirus antiviral drugs by as much as a month, potentially saving lives. Canadian researchers in September found that AI made consistently better choices than doctors in treating behavioral problems. Even a button-down institution like Deloitte has a staffer who has persuasively argued that we should use AI, not humans, to update government regulations.
The exhibit's AI also generated these New Year's resolutions:
  • "Treat every dog I meet like a celebrity."
  • "Every time I see a mirror I will remember that it is the gateway to another dimension."

The AI researcher behind the project also generated Slashdot headlines back in 2017, using 162,000 headlines from the site's first 20 years. Some of my favorites:

  • More Pong Users for Kernel Project
  • Red Hat Releases Linux Games And Moon
  • Why Open Source Power Man Sues Java
  • Microsoft Releases New Months
  • Ask Slashdot: Do We Want To Be the Computers?

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AI-Generated New Year's Resolutions Exhibited by the Smithsonian More

AI-Generated New Year's Resolutions Exhibited by the Smithsonian

Comments Filter:

  • Why (Score:4, Interesting)

    by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Sunday January 02, 2022 @04:57AM (#62135427) Journal

    If your output looks just like a bunch of MadLibs, why even try to pretend it's intelligent?

  • "AI generated headlines make more sense..." (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Editorial Failure ( 7475146 ) on Sunday January 02, 2022 @04:57AM (#62135429)

    "... than these editors' headlines usually do".

    Having computers munge text for funsies has been done well more than fifty years now, so this isn't news. Not even "have an AI do it". It's been powering spam email and SEOed websites and clickbait headlines for ages.

    It isn't likely to outperform functional humans in making more than accidental sense any time soon. But quite a few humans are only barely functional, if that.

    • Is there a difference between:

      AI = Artificial Intelligence
      AI = Actual Idiocy

      Or is it still to be resolved?

  • Wow (Score:4, Funny)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Sunday January 02, 2022 @05:16AM (#62135451)

    That's 3 minutes I'll never get back.

  • AI in government (Score:3)

    by Registered Coward v2 ( 447531 ) on Sunday January 02, 2022 @05:57AM (#62135479)
    The article on AI in government is interesting. I was involved in a project where part of it was using AI to identify similar contracts to consolidate requirements and contracts to streamline procurement and reduce costs. As TFA pointed out, AI is faster and probably more accurate than a person; and a person can always validate and check results. the idea of a digital academy and reserve training, modeled after the service academies and ROTC is an interesting way to build capability and offer talented individuals a free education in exchange for government service.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Entrope ( 68843 )

      Was that AI more appropriate to the problem domain than the one that gave us "Every time I see a mirror I will remember that it is the gateway to another dimension"?

      • Was that AI more appropriate to the problem domain than the one that gave us "Every time I see a mirror I will remember that it is the gateway to another dimension"?

        Yes, though it was a bit concerning when we expressed some concerns and the AI responded with “I can see you're really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over.”

  • More useful resolution (Score:3)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Sunday January 02, 2022 @06:07AM (#62135491)

    Okay, so probably not many people will really "Go into a library, climb up onto a shelf, yell down 'I am a giant giraffe!'" But it's a lot easier than trying to lose those 15 pounds.

    Nevermind the library giraffe business. How about "This year, I will endeavor to use metric units in my stories, so I don't look like I'm stuck in the 19th century"?

    • Okay, so probably not many people will really "Go into a library, climb up onto a shelf, yell down 'I am a giant giraffe!'" But it's a lot easier than trying to lose those 15 pounds.

      Nevermind the library giraffe business. How about "This year, I will endeavor to use metric units in my stories, so I don't look like I'm stuck in the 19th century"?

      When you pry the foot long hot dog from my cold dead hands.

  • AI strings random words together... (Score:3)

    by swilver ( 617741 ) on Sunday January 02, 2022 @07:18AM (#62135549)

    ...and researcher cherry picks the ones that make (some) sense!

    News at 11 !

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by narcc ( 412956 )

      There's no question that you could get equally good results from a Markov chain generator. Maybe better, as the goal is "whimsy".

      Just as an example, here are a few of the things I got out of one after feeding it the first three chapters of Frazer's The Golden Bough:

      Yet the tradition recorded by Cato seems probable to be called the Law of Contact or his sister unchaste

      The cactus-seekers themselves make the hemp grow tall

  • I had a cheap falafel at the food truck yesterday and spent the rest of New Year's Day in a porta-potty. I feel bad for the nearby ecosystem when they dump the thing. --- Yeah, about as breathtakingly relevant as a computer playing MadLibs.

  • "Treat every dog I meet like a celebrity." (Score:3)

    by cas2000 ( 148703 ) on Sunday January 02, 2022 @09:57AM (#62135725)

    But dogs are nice and interesting and entertaining. They don't deserve to be ignored as if they're worthless parasites.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by xevioso ( 598654 )

      You mean, worthless parasite celebrities like trump?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by cas2000 ( 148703 )

        Him too, but really all of them. People spend far too much time and effort giving a shit about what famous people do, who they're fucking, who they're not fucking, what stupid thing they've spent stupid amounts of money on, what their favourite food is, and other meaningless shit.

        Narcissistic fascists like Trump wouldn't have been a problem if people ignored them rather than deified them.

        In general, though, people don't need "heroes" - especially manufactured ones. They're a distraction from things that ac

  • AI? (Score:3)

    by dcw3 ( 649211 ) on Sunday January 02, 2022 @10:36AM (#62135767) Journal

    How is this AI? What's more intelligent about this than a random number generator picking from a list of responses. If people are paying for this shit, I'm coming out of retirement.

  • We tried this in WWII. Human computers were good enough to help beat the Axis, but electronics are faster at arithmetic.

  • Who decided WHICH of the 800,000,000 resolutions that it output would be the ones to announce? Another AI? Ha

  • .. turn off the damned computer and go outside!

  • Both

    "Treat every dog I meet like a celebrity."

    and

    "Every time I see a mirror I will remember that it is the gateway to another dimension."

    This AI has been reading my journal!

  • This lady did not design anything nor did she train the 175 billion parameters of GPT-3, one of the largest language models in history. OpenAI designed and trained GPT-3. She gave it a text prompt, which is trivially easy and much more fun.

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