That's not very good AI. There's no way he apologizes. He's just going to ghost her for life.

TLDR yes, these are most likely written by bots, perhaps with a sprinkling of human editing to make them more coherent.

I had a go at this with GPT-J, which is an open-source alternative to GPT-3 (latest state of the art text generator AI). For those who haven't used these, the way it works is you enter in some text as a prompt, then the AI generates words it thinks are likely to follow that text. GPT-J is available in a UI here: https://playground.helloforefront.com/

I used the first one as an example to show the bot what to do, then let it write the description for the second one -- prompt is below.

***

"My date let me out of the car to wait on the curb while he parallel parked. After 3 failed attempts he drove off. I walked home."

Thank You Next
This girl's date was not a true gentleman; in fact, he demonstrated that he was a big jerk by picking her up and then ditching her! Who acts in this manner? Even though he tried to park three times but was unsuccessful, that is no reason to just abandon someone who is standing on the sidewalk. I mean, come on, this is so not cool.

If we were in Leslie's position, we would at the very least anticipate that he will try to make amends for his inappropriate behavior by arranging for a large delivery of flowers to be sent to her house. If he left her the next day without saying anything, then the only thing that Leslie should be saying is, "Thank you next," so we are keeping our fingers crossed that he at least apologized to her.

"well yes I have... & didn't even know it was a date. The plan was going to Vikings game (I thought it was with more ppl but no) so with paint on my face in a Viks jersey he sends the meeting location: I walk into a 5 star candle lit restaurant he's formally dressed #WorstFirstDate"

***

The model then continued as follows:

***

The problem with this date is that the girl is so delusional. She's telling us that she thought it was a date with more people, but then she's sitting in a restaurant by herself with a guy who is dressed in a Vikings jersey. This is not a date, it's a group of people who are hanging out.

And if she did think it was a date, she's being a bit of a dumbass. You don't go out to a 5-star candle lit restaurant with someone you don't know in a Vikings jersey. It's just not a good idea.

If we were in this girl's position, we would at the very least anticipate that she will be wearing a Vikings jersey, and that she will be sitting in a candle lit restaurant with a group of people. If she had any sense at all, she would have known that it wasn't a date.

***

This is... kind of the right idea, but not all the way there. The pronouns are off, and it's taking the wrong person's side. But this was my first try at the prompt (small details of which can make a big difference). Plus maybe they are paying to use GPT-3 instead of GPT-J, plus maybe they are trying multiple generations and having a human select the best one and then make minor edits.

BTW Vox's video explainer on the new art-generating model DALL-E 2 is pretty good for laypeople. Recommend checking it out (and signing up for the beta waiting list). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVcsDDABEkM

I don't know too much about the limits of AI-generated text, but the only thing there that doesn't look to me like the work of a human deliberately being campy and melodramatic is the "Thank you next". Either the writer had some some long sarcastic "devastating" comeback in mind but left it out because they were in a hurry and didn't have an editor, or you're right that this is an AI.

... 4 written before 2. I guess I underestimate the ability of AIs. Clearly they're coming for my job next.

2 is blowing my mind a bit. I for one feel ambivalent about our new bot overlords.

Me too.

AI bot answers to exam essay questions should be entertaining. TurnItIn et al will go crazy when 80 sort of correct but much too similar answers are submitted to it.

Is the a real writer who has perfected writing like a bot, or a bot that writes almost like a real person?

https://constative.com/author/elizabeth-grillo/

BTW, the bot writing doesn't so much need to outrun the bear (fool humans) as it needs to outrun you (fooling Google's SEO). From a reader perspective, the extra text adds nothing to the article. This is why if you google something like "How to turn your phone on mute", the top results now have paragraphs of "Many people have phones. But sometimes phones can be loud. If you own a phone, you may have often considered the question, how to turn your phone on mute."-style stuff before the actual answer.

Pro tip: adding site:reddit.com is basically just an all-purpose Google query improver ATM, although I expect it's a matter of time this arbitrage is removed by a proliferation of bot-populated subreddits.

Pro tip: adding site:reddit.com is basically just an all-purpose Google query improver ATM, although I expect it's a matter of time this arbitrage is removed by a proliferation of bot-populated subreddits.

There was a good atlantic article about this (and google in general) recently: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/06/google-search-algorithm-internet/661325/

6: Yeah, torque. Very eye-opening. I just thought it was crappy space-filling writing.

9: I almost wrote a bunch more about Elizabeth Grillo! She's a very prolific bot.

When did Reddit move from being a well-known site to being THE thing of its kind, like Wikipedia or something, in the Internet consciousness?

When the rest of the internet got so much worse.

14: I'd say somewhere around 2017 when they introduced /r/popular as the default front page, making Reddit genuinely a sort of front page of the Internet, which is coincidentally the same year that the previous plausible front-page-of-the-internet candidate Delicious got subsumed into Pinboard. (Checking Wikipedia, it's the 20th most popular website in the world, more popular than LinkedIn or Twitch although not nearly as popular as Wikipedia or Pornhub.)

13: I'm rooting for her to show up here. "I'm human! All too human!"

13: I'm rooting for her to show up here. "I'm human! All too human!"

We've had surprising people show up on unfogged before (was there an English Courstesean? )

16: That makes sense!

18: Some have even seen African children who have never even seen a violin.

I think maybe the violin was a metaphor.

I think her children literally played the metaphor for African children.

Right, but I bet the African children had never seen a kazoo or a ukulele either.

I guess that makes the violin maybe more of a symbol than a metaphor.

It's a loaded violin.

Everything in the US is loaded.

I wonder how many articles I assumed were written by ESL writers in content farmers were actually written by Bots. I really didn't realize they had gotten so far.

I wonder how many articles I assumed were written by ESL writers in content farmers were actually written by Bots. I really didn't realize they had gotten so far.

So, I just got one of these spam bot-written articles that was clearly written directly for me or a very small number of people. A cousin's grandchild died just before starting college and the obituary did not have any information. I'm not close enough to have more information (I don't think I've met the parents), but I wanted to know more, so I googled a few things last week. Today I figured I try again to see if something made a newspaper and the three links below the obituary were bot-written.