By: Lazar Bošković, creative director, AgitPROP
Can Artificial Intelligence, some human-like machines, produce MEANINGFUL ORIGINAL content? What can robots really produce of the four possible types of written content: meaningful non-original, meaningless original, meaningful original or meaningless non-original content?
First, a brief definition of concepts: MEANINGFULL is that which meets a real need of a human being (with a decent IQ). ORIGINAL is something that was newly created, and is not a copy of something previously created. These are not scientific definitions, but my own view of reality.
A person can produce all four of the above listed content types, and robots can produce only three. Is this premise that my craft – creating MEANINGFUL ORIGINAL content – will always be a necessary human profession just a way I reassure myself as an author? Let’s see…
1 – Meaningful original content
An individual (author, journalist, writer, screenwriter, blogger …) produces some new, personal writing, in any form and on any topic. You consume this original piece of content with a clear notion of who created it, and the content is both original and meaningful.
So, reading someone’s book or someone’s article, watching a movie or TV commercial recorded on someone’s screenplay … You know what creative human hand (or more precisely, the brain) created it. This author (should) harvest the fruits of their work, but also be responsible for the work they have created.
2 – Meaningful non-original content
That’s what you read, listen and watch every day in the media. News agencies, companies, states, spin doctors … various subjects eager to influence the masses … daily deliver content that (somehow) has a certain meaning. The media make a mess out of it, and you often don’t know where the initial information came from (or it was intentionally hidden), and then through the copy / paste “journalism” it is proliferated through the vast digitally connected world. Lazy journalists copy it from those who published it first, and naive citizens share it, like it, comment it…
I wrote about the dire consequences such approach can cause in my text “Who hoodwinked Masha and the Bear?”. Placement of meaningless non-original content doesn’t require any participation of a real person, because this can be done even by the most basic RSS news aggregator, an internet tool that doesn’t even need artificial intelligence and its capabilities at all.
3 – Meaningless original content
There are sites on the Internet called “bullshit generators“. They excellently describe what is meaningless yet original. A bunch of common phrases, devoid of special meaning, packed in a form that had previously not existed. It’s something like the banter of bad, but resourceful students at an exam.
This is also an example of use of artificial intelligence for writing – or more precisely, it is an example of how robots can work. Unfortunately, most of today’s “journalists” are at the same level of “creative” capacity in their tabloid work environment. Because tabloid = android (in the original meaning of the word, not as an operating system).
4 – Meaningless non-original content
What are all the governments in this world systematically doing against their citizens? Burying them in bullshit. All the reality trash, showbiz madness and criminal confessions screaming from the front pages of tabloids and pinkoids have only two purposes:
- You are occupied with problems, which makes it a problem to realized that you are occupied. To put it more clearly, in an intentionally created forest of (half)information you are prevented from seeing what is really happening around you.
- “We, the politicians, are better than this reality, showbiz, criminal scum, so vote for us”. To put it more clearly, besides these four groups there is no one normal in the headlines, so the people thinks that there are no normal people, and that politicians are actually the benchmark of normalcy. ?
I wrote more widely about this as well in the article “Serbian politics on the internets and facebooks”, in the section “Mercenaries and believers”. In short: it’s almost everything about spin doctors and bots.
In my opinion, bots and all the other machines based on artificial intelligence can produce content under 2, 3 and 4, and will never be able to produce meaningful original content. They will be able to:
- Take over original (human made) content and proliferate them further (in any form)
- Create quasi-original content through random compiling of what they received as original input from people.
- Create a meaningless compilation of what they received as an original input from people.
You think it isn’t so?
Well, try to imagine if a robot could write a text like this one?!
NOTE: This article is not a scientific work, but just one vision of our reality from the angle of a concerned citizen.
