The AI I wrote about right before quarantine is now helping me laugh through it
Hi there,
I recently finished a longform feature for Quanta on "artificial common sense"—my first piece of science writing produced under quarantine conditions.
What I love about this story is the funny paradox at its core. Common sense is an ability to infer what's "obviously" true about everyday situations, but computers have a hell of a tough time with it. So, to make new progress on the problem, a researcher used a neural network whose superpower is bullshitting.
Wait, what?
Read the story; it'll all make sense.
About 2 weeks after that piece ran—and 9 weeks into our increasingly maddening new normal—I discovered that another AI expert had bent that same bullshitting neural network to a different, much dumber, but arguably more valuable (to me, anyway) purpose.
He used it to make a website that generates dorky made-up dictionary definitions.
The site is called This Word Does Not Exist, and it is helping keep me sane with every snorting, nerdy snicker I get out of it. To wit:
My wedding anniversary is coming up, maybe I'll slip that term of endearment into the card.
Should that be my new Twitter bio?
Anyway: your mileage will vary, but I get enough consistent laughter out of this AI toy that I set my browser up to open to the page automatically. Hitting refresh on it a few times makes a great chaser after reading the morning headlines.
Do you have anything like that, these days? Something that you can count on to spark a moment of silly, brainless, not-remotely-Marie-Kondo-related joy?
If not, try to find one. It's just common sense. {groan}
(Sorry: intentionally inflicting that bad dad-joke/magazine-kicker on you is another thing that brings me brainless joy.)
Take it easy,
J
PS! I can't resist recommending 3 more things in this department (feel free to hit reply and do the same):
- "Angle Dance", a music video (from the classic 80's educational TV show Square One) designed to teach 12-year-olds about geometry via Weird Al-level musical parody of New Wave tropes. It commits and it is The Best. If it were a single on iTunes I would buy it.
- "Saving Apollo 13", a podcast about, well, you know. This is a deeper dive into the technical details of what really happened, and it's really neat to mentally compare with the movie. But honestly the main selling point is that the narrator has an on-11 Irish accent ("Apollo Tertane") that just sounds musical and soothing even while he's going on about executing controlled burns or whatever.
- Txt.fyi: "the dumbest publishing platform on the web" (which I would have used to write this PS, except it's undergoing maintenance as I compose this). It's fun. Also, this composition on it is what the inside of my brain looks like during quarantine.