Our own little Turing Test

[bretbernhoft]

The neon lights of the city blazed brightly as Alice made her way through the crowded streets. She was a skilled hacker, one of the best in the city, and she had been hired by a mysterious client to retrieve a valuable piece of information from the servers of a powerful corporation.

As Alice made her way through the dark alleys and abandoned buildings of the city, she couldn't help but feel a sense of excitement. The thrill of the hack was like a drug to her, and she couldn't wait to see what secrets the corporation was hiding.

After hours of careful planning and execution, Alice finally accessed the corporation's servers and began to search for the information her client had requested. As she dug deeper into the data, she realized that the corporation had been hiding a sinister secret - they had been conducting illegal experiments on human subjects, altering their DNA and giving them superhuman abilities.

Alice knew she had to get this information out to the public, and she quickly began to upload it to the dark web. But as she worked, she heard the sound of footsteps approaching, and she knew that the corporation had discovered her intrusion.

With no time to lose, Alice made a break for it, narrowly escaping the clutches of the corporation's security forces. As she fled through the city streets, she knew that she had made a powerful enemy, but she also knew that she had done the right thing by exposing the corporation's dark secrets. And as she disappeared into the night, she couldn't wait to take on her next challenge as a cyberpunk hero.

Was this story written by a human or an Artificial Intelligence?

 

[tinkerdan]

I'd say either a bot of some sort or someone who really really really loves the adverb...as.
Often using it in the way someone would use And then..
This--and then that-and then...and so on and so on.

However the use of couldn't as the only noticeable contraction begins to argue that it was a person trying to write as a machine and slipping up.

They might write like Cory Doctorow. [Not sure that's a good thing.]

It seems to lack some character involvement(emotions and senses)

Oh wait.
Sorry.
This wasn't up for critique was it?

 

[Christine Wheelwright]

I went with AI. It is a bland story that fails to inspire any emotional response in the reader. However, it is technically well written. Therefore AI (technically ok, but dull). I must admit I am very curious to see the answer.

 

[JunkMonkey]

Too 'so what?' to have been written by a human - unless they were deliberately trying to make it read like a robot had written it.

 

[Swank]

It is clearly an AI marketing the possibility that AI could give you (nerds) super powers.

If this was written by a human, they were sure trying to sound like a machine.

 

[THX1138]

I went with human just because it reads like it was written by an AI. It seems just a little too obvious to me.
Like others have pointed out, it lacks emotions, and 'couldn't'. It also reads a little choppy to me.

 

[Alex The G and T]

I think that it takes a human to write this poorly. I know the type; I've seen 'em before.

 

[mosaix]

There should be a third option - Can’t Decide.

 

[Dave]

There is no Artificial Intelligence. Well, not yet! In these so called, "AI written" stories, the machines are given existing pieces of text to digest, and told to write something similar, in a similar style. They can copy the style very well, but they can't write anything of substance without a certain amount of plagiarism and human editing. In essence, they are only piecing together stock phrases and words they have copied. There is much human input and human involvement - which texts are selected, how the algorithm is designed or adjusted - so I agree that there needs to be more than a binary option in the poll. This is either a machine written piece or a human trying to write like one. It isn't artificial intelligence.

I would ask you, 'Can it actually take notice of critiques and improve itself?' It must be able to learn and to break free of the parameters set by the programmer.

What I will give you, is that while that is a boring and dull story, it doesn't make the same kind of mistakes I've seen in others due to the machine having no understanding of the real world i.e. I read a Harry Potter "AI" story where Harry Potter ate Death Eaters. However, it did have the same kind of repetition in the beginning of sentences i.e. too much, "Ron...." followed by a verb.

However, I have a little X-Files 'Script creating' program from over 20 years ago that I have filled up with text and phrases taken from the TV series and TV films. I've also filled it with Star Trek, Stargate and other stock phrases. It also involves human input to run, but it makes perfectly good conversations that make perfect sense too. And no AI is involved.

 

[psikeyhackr]

An AI or a really poor human writer.

 

[paranoid marvin]

If it's a piece of text written to look like AI, I'd say 'what's the point?' The idea of the Turing Test is for AI to be indistinguishable from humans, not the other way around.

I'm assuming this is a piece of text written by a human, as it isn't consistent with contractions, and is grammatically incorrect in places. Regardless of imagination or style, I would expect a computer not to make mistakes with grammar. I also would think that it would try to avoid to much repetition (eg the word 'she').

 

[Cat's Cradle]

Agree with paranoid marvin, and the repetition made me think 'human writer', too. The two words 'the city' are used four times, but perhaps most tellingly, they are used once in each of the first three sentences. Too many adjectives here, too.
But I don't know what level of proficiency a writing program would have... would they make mistakes of repetition? Couldn't that be programmed out of their writing? Don't know... my gut says human...

 

[JunkMonkey]

Agree with paranoid marvin, and the repetition made me think 'human writer', too. The two words 'the city' are used four times, but perhaps most tellingly, they are used once in each of the first three sentences. Too many adjectives here, too.
But I don't know what level of proficiency a writing program would have... would they make mistakes of repetition? Couldn't that be programmed out of their writing? Don't know... my gut says human...

Humans do that all the time. No one, I think, would claim that Dickens was a robot.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way–in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.​

~ A Tale of Two Cities
​

That's eight uses of "it was the" in one sentence.

 

[Elckerlyc]

I went for AI. Too poorly written even for a third-grade human writer.
I was poorly written, lacks suspense and misses the opportunity (like the approaching footsteps), lacks a wagon-load of essential details, makes no sense as a narrative of a hacker physically entering a building (apparently also a skilled a burglar), to make something public uploads to the dark web etc etc.

 

[Astro Pen]

AI because it uses Alice too many times after we have established who she is and the terms like 'mysterious client' and 'a powerful corporation' are far to generalised. As though they are from the 'brief' that the AI was given and used verbatim. In fact a lot of the terminology is generic. Human writers don't do that.

 

[paranoid marvin]

Humans do that all the time. No one, I think, would claim that Dickens was a robot.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way–in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.​

~ A Tale of Two Cities
​

That's eight uses of "it was the" in one sentence.

To be fair, Dickens uses repetition here as a writing technique to improve his story telling, whereas the example above (the word 'she' is used 18 times, 'the corporation' 7 times in 11 sentences) doesn't.

 

[Cat's Cradle]

Humans do that all the time. No one, I think, would claim that Dickens was a robot.

Again, I agree with pm. Big difference between Dickens' effective, intentional technique, and the bit I referenced, which I believe is an example of a lack of technique, and proper editing.

edit - and I agree, too, pm about the use of she... 18 is a lot.

edit 2 - aargh, not good to have a typo in a post about writing, *sigh*. Fixed it.

 

[Swank]

I've certainly read worse in the Critiques section. Bots?

 

[Vince W]

AI, although it’s bad enough to read as human.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

The repetition in the Dickens quote is a rhetorical device, the name of which escapes me just now ... maybe anaphora? That, and the series of contrasts, and maybe some techniques I am not catching at the moment, makes it a highly sophisticated bit of writing.

If we ever develop an AI capable of Dickens's level of linguistic sophistication and flexibility I think we will be in big, BIG trouble.

But I agree with those who say that the passage put up for discussion in the first post may just be a human writing badly. I've definitely read worse by beginning writers (including, I have to admit, my own early attempts), although in this case it might be an intentional attempt to fool us.