D9
人工智能写作能替代文学作品么？
卫报
Many people will be familiar with automated writing through two features of Gmail. Smart Reply proffers brief answers to routine emails. More strikingly, Smart Compose kicks in as you write, suggesting endings to your sentences.
The New Yorker’s John Seabrook recently described a more powerful version of this technology, called gpt-2, which can ably mimic his magazine’s style. Such systems use a digital network of billions of artificial “neurons” with virtual “synapses”—the connections between neurons—that strengthen as the network “learns”.
The metaphor of the brain is tempting, but “neurons” and “synapses” deserve those scare-quotes. The system is merely making some—admittedly very sophisticated—statistical guesses about which words follow which in a New Yorker-style sentence. What eludes computers is creativity. They cannot conceive a topic or goal on their own, much less plan how to get there with logic and style.
But to truly write, you must first have something to say. Computers do not. They await instructions. To compose meaningful essays, the likes of gpt-2 will first have to be integrated with databases of real-world knowledge. This is possible at the moment only on a very limited scale.
An advance in integrating knowledge would then have to be married to another breakthrough: teaching text-generation systems to go beyond sentences to structures. The longer the text one solicited from gpt-2, the more obvious it was that the work it produced was gibberish. Each sentence was fine on its own; three or four back to back could stay on topic, apparently cohering. But machines are aeons away from being able to recreate rhetorical and argumentative flow across paragraphs and pages. Not only can today’s journalists expect to finish their careers without competition from the Writernator—today’s parents can tell their children that they still need to learn to write, too.
网友评论