Haha yeah it's a little disappointing (yet interesting) how it comes close but misses the mark. I wonder how far away we are to having machine-generated output that's tough to distinguish from the input you put into it.

The Obama one is much better, but the thing is none of these are even remotely close. They sort of seem close on the surface if you simply don't engage any critical parts of your brain, or try to extract any meaning, but if you do the semblance of meaning that's inherent in the words melts away into nothing.

To generate output that contained meaning that you could actually engage with, you'd have to first generate the meaning and then turn that into text. That's a fundamentally different process to what is going on here. This is also why 'Turing Test' competitions involving chat bots are never going to give us artificial intelligence.

This sort of text generation is like a magician's trick where he appears to saw the woman in half and put her together again. I don't care how good the magician is at the trick, he's not going to be any help at all to a surgeon that's actually cutting someone in half and then stitching them back together again.

> This sort of text generation is like a magician's trick where he appears to saw the woman in half and put her together again.

That's a really good analogy!

yep, this is so true. i was really excited about the tiny fragments that seemed to hold meaning, but they were obviously just happy accidents.

ohno i was totally planning on doing this next ):