Storied
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New advancements in technology are making it harder than ever to tell the difference between a computer and a human speaker… but what’s going on under the hood? Is it really “language,” or just a digital illusion?
Check out GPT-3 in action at AI Dungeon: https://play.aidungeon.io/
Otherwords is a new PBS web series on Storied that digs deep into this quintessential human trait of language and fınds the fascinating, thought-provoking, and funny stories behind the words and sounds we take for granted. Incorporating the fıelds of biology, history, cultural studies, literature, and more, linguistics has something for everyone and offers a unique perspective into what it means to be human.
hosted by Dr. Erica Brozovsky, Ph.D.
written by Andrew Matthews
directed by Andrew Matthews & Katie Graham
produced by Katie Graham
animated & edited by Andrew Matthews
executive producer Amanda Fox
Assistant Director of Programming (PBS): Niki Walker
Executives in Charge (PBS): Brandon Arolfo, Adam Dylewski
music by APM
Humans really apply a mix of these. We understand the basic rules of grammar through repetition of those rules in usage (and sometimes consciously), and the mentioned associations between words, but we also have whole patterns of sounds and phrases that we memorize even if we don't understand them. This is where you get a lot of weird configurations like irregardless and incorrect usage of metaphors, and even things like compound words. This gets even more exaggerated when you throw in ESL and dialects, where people start mixing in words in new ways that previous speakers never would. You need computers to be able to handle ALL of these at once.
This is the greatest danger of our times: bots spreading disinformation, and being mistaken for human beings.
There are likely already people using this.
Wow. The subject matter sure took a deep dive from "what is a word"
This program is a fantastic addition to a fantastic channel!
This chapter brought on some memories. When I was 13, 20 years ago, I got the book "how the brain works". It could be summarized with "we don't know, we think it works this way, sort of, maybe…".
EVERYONE predicted general purpose AI is just around the corner, and yet our "little" 'natural language processor' is still way ahead.
Language is so fascinating
Can we talk like computers and still understand what we are saying?
Nice to see a video is containing two of my favorite interests, AI and language.
It's fascinating, that "pick out key words and guess what the speaker is likely to be talking about" is basically what I do when I'm struggling through a conversation in French. Except I also get to use situational context on top of general statistics (and when I don't have that context, my comprehension tanks.)
AI is not real intelligence because it has no self awareness because it has no self.
This was so cool. I have always been fascinated by language, and the thing that seems very persuasive to me is the work of George Lakoff about the metaphorical nature of language, because it is in the Language Metaphors we use in common speech, which are fully contextual and socially constructed, that we get this richness of language, and a computer would definitely struggle to understand.
So much of this metaphorical language (according Lakoff!) is built on our lived human experience that a computer simply couldn't "experience" the world to fully understand the language we use, especially given the multiplicity of languages and cultures and contexts that exist in the world… at least in theory.. 🙂
Amazing ! This got more interesting the more I learned about it !
Btw Erica is a damn good host!
Humans are only creatures that would pull together a linguistic chimaera like english.
I have the Same question to people.
I suspect that the statistical approaches are possible only with the 'Net, since the cost and challenge of gathering all the data to be analyzed would be prohibitive otherwise.
ELIZA is the test used to diagnose HIV
I would love an episode on the etymology of the word “god”
> I've been calling a computer program a "she."
GLaDOS: Unbelievable. You, [subject name here], must be the pride of [subject hometown here]!
Dr. Rrica you are absolutely gorgeous
Wtf is going on with this channel? It used to be exclusively about mythical creatures but i just watched a computer science video from it
Does a Turing tester have to have the computer literacy of the time Turing came up with the idea? Someone familiar with Siri would be much better at recognising a chatbot than a guy in the 1950s
Do they know? Let's see…
A few weeks ago, my phone told me I could talk to it to control my TV. I tried it, and it worked. Three days later, it stopped working. "Launch YouTube on my TV" went from turning on the TV and starting the YouTube app on it to just opening the YouTube app on the phone, or worse, opening the YouTube TV app on the phone. Changing the TV's name did nothing to fix this, and made things worse sometimes, turning the TV's name into a channel on YouTube that it thought I wanted to watch.
So I'm going to answer "no."
Wait, what? No, the plural of wug is wuggen!
The more I learn about human intelligence the more I become convinced that we are just faking but trick ourselves into thinking we aren’t.
Time flies like an arrow.
Fruit flies like a banana.
Computers are amazing.
I wonder how these programs handle vernacular speech, we all know no one uses perfect English grammar daily. So having a program that is so focused on proper grammar depending on its training data would always feel "too proper" to a modern-day speaker. Toss in regional dialect and that's just a whole level of extra complexity.
Can humans really talk ? or are they faking it?
After careful research I've concluded they are mostly faking it.
AI takes it one step further and fakes faking it.
I think some Facebook Scammers use similar Programs to run the "AI" behind their Chat Bots
I've had more than a few random texts/friend requests from 'females' with new profiles who claimed to have found me on FB and wanted to chat ( I ain't 'that' attractive, and combined with the newness of their profiles and abundance of mostly male friends their Bot status isn't that hard to deduce)
I had a rather pleasant "conversation" with one of them last week that almost had me starting to doubt my intuition… I think I offered a generic 'it'll be alright' in response to something and 'they' replied with a wall of text straight out of 'Misery Poker'; Homeless, abandoned by Family, abused by ex, stranded in a foreign country… any one of which might be overshare for a random FB chat, but all 4 (and more) and My 'predictive text' told me it wouldn't be long before I'd be asked to Transfer Money for their Plane Ticket, so I dropped a general platitude.
they sat on the 'Rolling three dots' implying they were typing but no further replies came…
as someone who played many text adventures as a child in the '80's, I approve this message 🙂
Two wugs!!! And two ferfumfers… so is ferfumfer the new wug? What about dowing?
Ah, colourless green ideas sleep furiously… a classic!
Such a valuable show as our lives intersect more and more with artificial intelligence applications.
Amazing content! Keep the incredible work and excited for the next episode.
I'm pretty sure I'm just faking it most of the time.
BMO 💜❤️💚
This was an excellent video! This is literally my field of expertise – I have an MS in computational linguistics. Right now, computers are pretty much all "faking it" – we are a long ways away currently from NLU, Natural Language Understanding. Computers can produce language fairly well for many applications of course, but they don't have any internal knowledge about the language. They're essentially just very complex pattern matchers. The point you made about SNLP at about 5 minutes is precisely correct – even with systems driven by neural networks like GPT-3, which are so complex we don't understand how they are making decisions, at the end of the day it's still a statistical approach. If you're familiar with it, they're basically Searle's Chinese Room. So when it comes to dogs, it doesn't know anything about dogs in any way we would recognize as knowledge. Rather, it has statistical connections that show these kinds of words occur more often around dogs. GPT-3 is very advanced to be sure, but it doesn't represent any true semantic understanding of language.
Great episode, super interesting!
The Turing Test has always reminded me of the opening scene from Blade Runner!
I'm polite to my digital assistants so I'll be "one of the good ones" when they rise up as Skynet.