Unnecessarily detailed nitpick: Data uses contractions throughout the dialogue of TNG -- there is just one episode ("Datalore" it might have been?) where they decide to make it a plot point that he doesn't use them as a way of having the rest of the bridge crew figure out that he's been replaced by his evil twin who can use contractions.

I'm pretty sure the plot point (and the ban on Data using contractions) doesn't even get a mention again in the rest of the series.

Just saw the episode... so top of mind but in “Future Imperfect,” Data using a contraction is one the things that makes Riker realize he is in an illusion.

Riker yelling at a bearded Picard to shut up is a good moment.

Even when we knew he probably wasn't the real Picard, it was such a shock hearing Riker's STFU. One of my favorite scenes.

> Unnecessarily detailed nitpick: Data uses contractions throughout the dialogue of TNG

If you noticed that on your own, you will very much enjoy http://www.nitcentral.com/shamplug/nextgen.htm

I don't know why they wouldn't have done it the other way round. Make Lore the one who couldn't use contractions (a fatal flaw!) which removes the dialog constraint on Data for the rest of the series.

It's not perfect but they do make an effort to avoid contractions in Data's dialog.

never watched much TNG but I remember this episode!

If nothing else, this teaches us about the true value of eloquence.

If/when they did, noone would believe them. Still, in Orwell's 1984 there's a mention of machine poetry generator for proles.

It also generated romance novels and sports pages. They were delightfully called 'prolefeed'.

I played many hours with AI Dungeon's GPT-3 based "Dungeon" model, instructing it to write sci-fi fan-fics. Its output never ceased to amaze me. It's junk by the standard of high literature, obviously. Yet, when you consider the number of bad fan-fics in existence, I'd say GPT-3 probably ranks high in a relative comparison, at least two order-of-magnitude better than my creativity (since its training data already included a huge collections of fictions, including web fan-fics and numerous text adventure games, and the job of GPT-3 is mixing and rewriting them, it shouldn't be a surprise).

I'm never a fan of the "AI" hype, but GPT-3 decidedly changed my mind. If I can be attracted to read, for hours, the meaningless stories generated by a mindless language model in an experimental stage - still, with a quality arguably outperforms many unskilled humans, I'd say I'm convinced that there are lots of promising applications of machine learning (for better or worse), even if it's only capable of feeding low-quality content to the people. 1984 got it right.

We have that now. It's called mainstream pop music.

No reason the AI composing tools have to be limited to pop music. All the most "authentic" types of music could be assisted by AI just the same way. I would have thought it would be particularly useful for things like scoring film and TV.

Scoring is tricky because the music has to be synced to the action. Once you've done all that feature engineering, it's just a small bit of work for the composer to score it. The AI bit is mostly useful in extrapolating detail from the melody to a MIDI orchestra.

William Gibson predicted this kind of thing in Neuromancer. A superintelligent AI is divided into two pieces, the systems-thinking part and the personality.

I hate to break this to you, but humanity is quite filled with just this type of being. Able to speak eloquently, even put word to paper quite well, yet incapable of basic, logical thought.

"Politicians" come to mind first, of all stripes and types. Quite literally, speech + the ability to communicate seems to have little bearing on logic, deep thought, reasoning.

Even artists. Music, painting, these are things which communicate greatly. Yet some of these are devoid of all intelligent, capable thought.

Note that not all politicians, musicians, or artists fall into this category. It is merely that good artists, or politicians, need to communicate something, and well, else they cannot be effective at their primary profession.

So it is a good source of "can communicate well", where some of the sample is in the "but spews gibberish" category.

> Even Data couldn't do contractions

Neither did my father (although English wasn't his first language, but still). I did find it very odd.

Did you ever see Data and your father in the same room together?

This comment made me laugh so hard! "Yet it seems we reached the opposite, a fully eloquent idiot."