One major stumbling block that must be overcome before a machine can claim to possess AGI is the issue of creativity. Humans find it easy to reach beyond the limits of their own knowledge and create something new – it might not be any good (however ‘good’ may be determined), but all of us can write poetry, draw, decorate and cook. These are creative processes, even if we don’t consciously appreciate them as such. Machines, on the other hand, largely do as they’re told.
Increasingly, though, machines are showing their creative side. As well as novels like 1 the Road, an AI bot named Benjamin wrote a short science fiction film called Sunspring in 2016, which was subsequently acted out and played during the SCI-FI-LONDON film festival. It remains available on YouTube.
Journalists, too, have reasons to be concerned. A number of media outlets including Forbes, The Washington Post and Reuters use machine learning tools to help them produce content. Bloomberg uses a computer system known as Cyborg to instantly turn financial reports into mini articles; according to the New York Times, it is now responsible for around a third of all the content produced by Bloomberg News.
Recent Comments