Word: humanity
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...progress of artificial intelligence. But the claim that computers can't create has been challenged by two recent experiments, in which the output of computer programs--rigid algorithms with little room for intellectual freedom--was judged to be indistinguishable (or even better!) than the attempts of unconstrained human imaginations. In other words, originality may be a little more unoriginal than we thought...
...subject of betrayal--hence the treacherous name. To teach the innocent computer its sinful ways, the computer scientists who designed it set about "mathematizing the concept of betrayal through a series of algorithms and data structures." Most people might assume that betrayal is not easily mathematized, a subject for human emotion and not for symbol manipulators, but the computer seems to have picked up the vice rather well. (A Rensselaer press release states that the programmers also taught Brutus.1 something of deception, evil, "and to some extent voyeurism"-- a project giving new meaning to the phrase "your data is corrupted...
More interestingly, however, only 25 percent of the visitors correctly identified the entry as computer-written --a figure barely above that predicted by random chance. The computer's work was, to many, indistinguishable from that of the human authors. The standard method of judging whether a computer is conscious or not is whether it "acts conscious"--whether an observer would be unable to tell that its output came from a computer and not another human. Brutus.1 has by no means become a thinking writer, but if its product looks human to readers, it has somehow made up for whatever capacity...
...formula: find the product's characteristic that is its selling point, and use images to emphasize that characteristic in the ad. A similar contest found that the ads the researchers' computers produced were generally as good as those of professional ad agencies, while they far surpassed the efforts of human amateurs. For instance, while a human suggested a picture of the walls of the Old City to promote a tennis tournament in Jerusalem, the computer proposed a domed mosque with the dome in the shape of a tennis ball...
...create ads for a classy brand of cat food resulted in images of the cat food in a formal ball room and of cat food teamed with Count Dracula. Do either of these examples describe true creativity? If creativity means creation in a vacuum, then no. However, very little human creativity may come out of a vacuum. The most powerful literature does not always deal with subjects never considered before, but often presents common experiences in a slightly different light. If a formula can make you look creative, maybe originality is more formulaic than the Romantic ideal of the inspired...