The next political speech you hear may be written by an AI
Our robot overlords will be freely elected.
Humanity has made huge advancements in chatbot technology over the past few years. Artificial Intelligence systems can now imitate Philip K Dick, write convincing thinkpiece pitches and even pass the Turing test. However, they've never quite gotten the hang of political speechwriting and, in some cases, wind up sounding downright subhuman. However, a team from University of Massachusetts, Amherst announced on Monday that they have built a robotic writer able to pen passable political sentences.
The Amherst team designed their AI using Google's n-gram technique, wherein the computer searched for sequences that include a given ("n") word to learn how it fit into the sentence syntax. It did so across more than 4,000 floor speeches delivered during 53 US Congressional floor debates. After crunching nearly 50,000 sentences, the AI can now write a convincing political argument from as little as five "seed" words such as:
Mr. Speaker, for years, honest but unfortunate consumers have had the ability to plead their case to come under bankruptcy protection and have their reasonable and valid debts discharged. The way the system is supposed to work, the bankruptcy court evaluates various factors including income, assets and debt to determine what debts can be paid and how consumers can get back on their feet. Stand up for growth and opportunity. Pass this legislation.
Looks like we'll soon be able to add politicians to the growing list of jobs that robots are going to take.
[Image Credit: Getty]
