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Can you imagine waking up one day in the near future and realizing that 96% of the tweets you have been reading for the past year have been generated by a compu

Can you imagine waking up one day in the near future and realizing that 96% of the tweets you have been reading for the past year have been generated by a computer? The sheer thought of that just blew my mind a little. It could drive the whole world mad.

Animats 9y ago
Twitter is probably up to 30% already.
- charlex815 9y ago
  Although, at this point it's mostly just spam, porn, and political bots at really really low quality. Imagine the day when worthwhile content with journalistic, artistic, or intellectual value is posted by machines. There are already some great bots pumping out tweets with color palette, non-sensical invention patent ideas, and historical events.
  - visarga 9y ago
    They can increase 1000x the output of text, I can read only about as much as before.
    - stult 9y ago
      Just wait until you have a tweet-reading bot that picks out the items most interesting to you. Arguably, we already have that in the form of Facebook's like-driven echo chamber algorithms. But it would be nice to have a version whose parameters are under your control rather than some large organization with questionable motives.
  - sr2 9y ago
    > Imagine the day when worthwhile content with journalistic, artistic, or intellectual value is posted by machines One way to cheat at this is to use existing intellectual discourse as a template, and simply swap out nouns/verbs with other ones, and change the structure slightly perhaps using Markov chains. Another way to appear more credible is to generate sources to backup your statements. Wikipedia is full of links and footnotes which prop up their entries. All that's needed is to scrape these and use them for your natural language generator.
- majewsky 9y ago
  Yeah, but I usually don't get to see it because I only see the stuff that the people I follow tweet or retweet. It's only when I click through into a tweet to look at the replies that I see the huge amount of junk that gets posted as replies to get more eyeballs.
krylon 9y ago
> Can you imagine waking up one day in the near future What do you mean "near future"? ;-) > It could drive the whole world mad. Mmmh, I think that has already happened a long time ago. But think of the day when nobody reads Twitter any more, because it is all machine-generated, and all you are left with are machines talking to machines about machines talking to machines. Think of the day when Facebook is nothing but computers uploading core dumps in their photo streams? (Emacs, of course, has a function to let ELIZA talk to Zippy the pinhead. Go figure. ;-P)

Animats 9y ago

Twitter is probably up to 30% already.

charlex815 9y ago
Although, at this point it's mostly just spam, porn, and political bots at really really low quality. Imagine the day when worthwhile content with journalistic, artistic, or intellectual value is posted by machines. There are already some great bots pumping out tweets with color palette, non-sensical invention patent ideas, and historical events.
- visarga 9y ago
  They can increase 1000x the output of text, I can read only about as much as before.
  - stult 9y ago
    Just wait until you have a tweet-reading bot that picks out the items most interesting to you. Arguably, we already have that in the form of Facebook's like-driven echo chamber algorithms. But it would be nice to have a version whose parameters are under your control rather than some large organization with questionable motives.
- sr2 9y ago
  > Imagine the day when worthwhile content with journalistic, artistic, or intellectual value is posted by machines One way to cheat at this is to use existing intellectual discourse as a template, and simply swap out nouns/verbs with other ones, and change the structure slightly perhaps using Markov chains. Another way to appear more credible is to generate sources to backup your statements. Wikipedia is full of links and footnotes which prop up their entries. All that's needed is to scrape these and use them for your natural language generator.
majewsky 9y ago
Yeah, but I usually don't get to see it because I only see the stuff that the people I follow tweet or retweet. It's only when I click through into a tweet to look at the replies that I see the huge amount of junk that gets posted as replies to get more eyeballs.

krylon 9y ago

> Can you imagine waking up one day in the near future What do you mean "near future"? ;-) > It could drive the whole world mad. Mmmh, I think that has already happened a long time ago. But think of the day when nobody reads Twitter any more, because it is all machine-generated, and all you are left with are machines talking to machines about machines talking to machines. Think of the day when Facebook is nothing but computers uploading core dumps in their photo streams? (Emacs, of course, has a function to let ELIZA talk to Zippy the pinhead. Go figure. ;-P)