Off topic: Technology Review: These awful AI song lyrics show us how hard language is for machines
Thread poster: Thomas T. Frost
Thomas T. Frost
Thomas T. Frost  Identity Verified
Portugal
Local time: 15:06
Danish to English
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Nov 24, 2018

https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/612412/these-awful-ai-song-lyrics-show-us-how-hard-language-is-for-machines/?fbclid=IwAR1sJJS-qCYfBAwot5naBcmy9lBi64GyvfeqNqcF8ni4Ft-tJoAhs9nvvAk

 
Jean Dimitriadis
Jean Dimitriadis  Identity Verified
English to French
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Versificator Nov 24, 2018

Dreadful rubbish! This reminded me of George Orwell's 1984:

It was only an ‘opeless fancy.
It passed like an Ipril dye,
But a look an’ a word an’ the dreams they stirred!
They ‘ave stolen my ‘eart awye!

The tune had been haunting London for weeks past. It was one of countless similar songs published for the benefit of the proles by a sub-section of the Music Department. The words of these songs were composed without any human interventi
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Dreadful rubbish! This reminded me of George Orwell's 1984:

It was only an ‘opeless fancy.
It passed like an Ipril dye,
But a look an’ a word an’ the dreams they stirred!
They ‘ave stolen my ‘eart awye!

The tune had been haunting London for weeks past. It was one of countless similar songs published for the benefit of the proles by a sub-section of the Music Department. The words of these songs were composed without any human intervention whatever on an instrument known as a versificator. But the woman sang so tunefully as to turn the dreadful rubbish into an almost pleasant sound.


And here's a song for robots: (Flight of the Conchords - Humans are dead) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWDjLrIDLx4
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Ricki Farn
 
Heinrich Pesch
Heinrich Pesch  Identity Verified
Finland
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Finnish to German
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AI = intelligence without understanding Nov 25, 2018

I believe artificial reason or artificial wisdom will never arrive. AI is based on statistical evaluation of huge pools of material, but statistics don't understand, they only tell us what they found.

Thomas T. Frost
John Fossey
Alison Jenner
Tom in London
 
Jennifer Forbes
Jennifer Forbes  Identity Verified
Local time: 15:06
French to English
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In memoriam
Dire, but ... Nov 25, 2018

... not much worse than the "lyrics" of today's "songs" - if you can even decipher them.

Kay-Viktor Stegemann
Robert Rietvelt
Tom in London
MollyRose
Jonathan Mello
 
Robert Rietvelt
Robert Rietvelt  Identity Verified
Local time: 16:06
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Spanish to Dutch
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Still rubbish.... Nov 25, 2018

.... but so were the results of the first translation machines 20 or 30 years ago. Lets have the same discussion in an odd 20 years or so. Every beginning is hard.

 
Phil Hand
Phil Hand  Identity Verified
China
Local time: 23:06
Chinese to English
I have a theory... Nov 26, 2018

...that computers might never really get human language. This might be wrong - it may be that as computers get better at all things, they simply acquire the ability to do human language as one computational skill among others. But they might not.

The argument goes like this: Language is the way we human express and communicate the thoughts that occur to us, embodied as we are in our physical forms, and limited as we are by our physical forms. Now computers could be embodied in rough
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...that computers might never really get human language. This might be wrong - it may be that as computers get better at all things, they simply acquire the ability to do human language as one computational skill among others. But they might not.

The argument goes like this: Language is the way we human express and communicate the thoughts that occur to us, embodied as we are in our physical forms, and limited as we are by our physical forms. Now computers could be embodied in roughly similar physical forms; they could share our experiences of vision and sound and touch. But they will necessarily never be limited in the way that we are limited. Even the most basic electronic machine can perform calculations thousands of times as complex as any human, and thousands of times faster. So there are at least some faculties which will always be much stronger than ours. No machine will ever have an ability profile that looks anything like a person's.

How might this mess up their ability to use human language? I wonder if computers will ever understand how and why we approximate so much. For example, could a computer ever comprehend the colour blue? When a computer sees a colour, it can express the tone and hue exactly, using a number. This would be much easier for the computer than translating the number into a human word, saying the word, and then having the other party completely misunderstand it.

Similarly with the use of metaphor: I reckon the computers of the future will know what metaphor is, sometimes be able to understand metaphors, and even generate metaphors. But they won't get why we use them, because for them precise expression will be much simpler, and so they'll still get lost during relatively simple human interactions as we shift from literal to metaphorical language and back again, barely knowing that we're doing it because it's so natural (and necessary!) for us.

I don't think this is a given at all; computers may be able to learn this stuff, just like everything else. But it's just possible that that it's human limitations, and our strategies for working around them, that will make computer-human interaction much less smooth than we might think.
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Daniel Frisano
Daniel Frisano  Identity Verified
Italy
Local time: 16:06
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English to Italian
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A lil help? Nov 28, 2018

Well, you can't expect a machine to produce the next Sgt. Pepper's.

Unless you provide it with the equivalent of LSD, that is.


 
Frank Wong
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Totally agree Nov 29, 2018

Heinrich Pesch wrote:

I believe artificial reason or artificial wisdom will never arrive. AI is based on statistical evaluation of huge pools of material, but statistics don't understand, they only tell us what they found.


The defining difference between artificial intelligence and real intelligence is the ability to think. AI seems to be able to "think", actually they are just doing what their programmers told them to do with a bunch of complex codes, logic, and vast database. If ever AI machines can learn like the receptionists in West World, human race will retire for good.


 
Tom in London
Tom in London
United Kingdom
Local time: 15:06
Member (2008)
Italian to English
Constant perplexity Nov 29, 2018

I am constantly perplexed by the infinite narcissism of the human race.

We are devoting ourselves, with immense effort, to trying to invent artificial means of doing what we already know how to do.

Why?

Why, for instance, do we need machines that think, when we already know (much better) how to think?

[Edited at 2018-11-29 13:14 GMT]


Thomas T. Frost
Roni_S
Ben Gaia
 
Thomas T. Frost
Thomas T. Frost  Identity Verified
Portugal
Local time: 15:06
Danish to English
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TOPIC STARTER
Pepper Nov 29, 2018

Daniel Frisano wrote:

Well, you can't expect a machine to produce the next Sgt. Pepper's.



It would probably go something like this: "Isolated society of the vital internal organ belt of the non-commissioned officer black spice," following which the music agent will deduct 75% of the royalties due recycled words.


 
Giovanni Guarnieri MITI, MIL
Giovanni Guarnieri MITI, MIL  Identity Verified
United Kingdom
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Member (2004)
English to Italian
Some lyrics... Nov 29, 2018

are better when recreated with AI...

 


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Technology Review: These awful AI song lyrics show us how hard language is for machines






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