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A comment on Writing tools I learned from The Economist. Parent comment

Re:Writing tools I learned from The Economist by coldtea on Monday April 05, 2021 @01:23PM (#26701822)
>How can a neural network evolve on its own.

Same way as humans? Via training on new inputs?

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Re:Writing tools I learned from The Economist by RobertKerans on Monday April 05, 2021 @01:56PM (#26702248)
It's not even vaguely similar to a person, so how would that work? ln this example, if you had a hypothetical AI that understood the UK class system + the political system + the press system + the way these interlocking relationships work from a particular elite PoV then sure, but that's magical thinking. The actual written style is a small part of that; the other things are the inputs.
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Re:Writing tools I learned from The Economist by coldtea on Monday April 05, 2021 @02:00PM (#26702299)
>ln this example, if you had a hypothetical AI that understood the UK class system + the political system + the press system + the way these interlocking relationships work from a particular elite PoV then sure, but that's magical thinking.

It doesn't have to understand any of those in any "human" sense, where it would be able to articulate what it understood on a meta level, etc.

It would just have to reinforce the right patterns and fuzzy connections that lead to success in writing credible looking articles....

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Re:Writing tools I learned from The Economist by RobertKerans on Monday April 05, 2021 @03:12PM (#26703279)
> It would just have to reinforce the right patterns and fuzzy connections that lead to success in writing _credible looking articles_

We're probably at a point where we can manufacture shallow fakes of the current writing style, and I'm sure techniques like this will become prevalent (because convenience), but I feel you're missing the point of what I'm saying. It does need to understand these things. If it doesn't, then what it is is a mechanical reproduction of a current style of writing: that's a completely different category of thing, it's not even close to similar.

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Re:Writing tools I learned from The Economist by dominotw on Monday April 05, 2021 @01:55PM (#26702241)
> Via training on new inputs?

There are no new inputs in this case because we got replaced editors with NN.

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Re:Writing tools I learned from The Economist by coldtea on Monday April 05, 2021 @02:01PM (#26702324)
Nothing stops us from feeding them the work of human editors in 2000000 other publications...

Or their own work, as ranked by readers (e.g. their past posts that had the more views and better engagement).

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Re:Writing tools I learned from The Economist by RobertKerans on Monday April 05, 2021 @03:16PM (#26703313)
No. This is drastically missing the point of what The Economist (or almost any media org) is. It isn't trying to be an average from 20000000 other publications, or what an average of readers think, or what had good engagement stats (though obviously the latter is a good target for the application of analytical software). It's not a neutral voice, or some down-the-middle average of what readers liked. It's an entity with its own political goals.
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