XPrize up for Artificial Intelligence that can give a TED talk

[electrograv]

I worry that this could be even more succeptible for a 'bag of tricks' AI to win than a traditional Turing Test, after looking at the rules[1].

Chatbots that perform the best on a traditional Turing Test are all extremely specialized 'bag of tricks' approaches. They can be surprisingly convincing, because they often use huge databases of real human responses to construct their own -- if you haven't already, I'd recommend giving Cleverbot a try[2].

However these chatbots often fail when an important continuity of facts is being discussed in context, where their parrot-like nature is exposed. Therefore I think this "TED XPRIZE" will be much easier to fool in this sense, because there's only two questions from the judges. This essentially removes the most difficult AI challenges of a traditional turing test.

Of course, succeeding at the "TED XPRIZE" would without a doubt require legitimate and significant advancements to the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Synthesizing a convincing talk/essay with an engaging narrative and central theme is no easy task (though limited successes already exist [3]).

But even now computers can beat humans in very specialized areas (and specialization is a key requirement to this). For example, we already have human level-facial recognition[4] and superhuman character recognition[5]. Similarly, while it would indeed be a legitimate AI advancement to be able to construct such a speech, I do not believe this would be any more a holy grail of AGI than character recognition and facial recognition. Instead, it would be incremental progress disguising itself as having already arrived.

[1] http://www.xprize.org/ted-rules

[2] http://cleverbot.com

[3] http://www.geekosystem.com/journal-accepts-nonsense-paper/

[4] https://www.facebook.com/publications/546316888800776/

[5] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.84.1...

[psuter]

From these bags of tricks, we can learn a lot about, if not AI, at least humans. My favorite example in that category is MGonz [1]:

    "In 1989 MGonz was able to fool a human subject for over an hour [...]
    MGonz worked on a simple principle: don’t reply to statements. Merely
    insult the person making the statement. Most of MGonz’s one-liners are
    too profane to repeat – but “ah, type something interesting or shut-up”,
    “what sort of idiot types something like that”, and “that’s it, I’m not
    talking to you anymore!” are fairly representative of the style. The
    programme simply pours a torrent of abuse on the unwitting human at the
    other end of the internet connection."

[1] http://www.saintsandsceptics.org/the-mgonz-test/

[quandrum]

> because they often use huge databases of real human responses to construct their own

Honestly, this often seems to be the conversational gambit of human beings.

Coming up with genuinely interesting conversation seems to be a task that takes too much effort for most everyday interactions.

Whether it be standard small chat, quoting cultural media, or reciting social group in-jokes, much of human interaction seems to also take a "bags of tricks" approach.

[krynsky]

The current rules are just meant as a high level baseline to start a discussion around designing the competition and the announcement was a call for people to do just that. An XPRIZE can take several months to years going through a design process before finalizing the rules. During that time domain experts are consulted to help define the competition.

[JabavuAdams]

My first conversation with Cleverbot:

User: Hi Cleverbot.

Cleverbot: How are you?

User: Fine. Let's talk Physics.

Cleverbot: Okay. Do you like trees?

User: That's a weird non-sequitur. Are familiar with Classical Mechanics?

Cleverbot: No.

User: It's just part of the physics we learn in high-school.

Cleverbot: Ich leibe tokio hotel.

[zhte415]

I attempted to use the voice of Lieutenant Data from Startrek The Next Generation to interact with the Internet facing Cleverbot interface. I regret to inform, HN, that Cleverbot performed worse than anticipated.

I did, however, witness some potentially interesting if antiquated webdesign, not least a promotion for a potentially more human-like 'friend finder', located at the base of the page. It has 199k 'likes', 20.7k 'follows' and 22.2k 'shares', leading to a strong possibility Cleverbot is merely a pseudo-presence, and the true nature of this website will transpire only by clicking more deeply.

[svantana]

Did you read the same article as me? From what I could gather, it's more of a challenge in robotics. Nothing seemed to indicate that the speech should be machine generated. Rather it's a matter of making a robot charismatic/impressive enough to engage the audience.

This prize doesn't seem very useful to me. If someone actually was able to pull this off, they would be better off making billions off of that tech in the marketplace instead...

[codingdave]

I'm not sure that this is a problem.

Even if the winner is a bag of tricks trick, it still would be something new in the way it is presented, with new tricks developed, and thereby surely would spark some innovation, would it not?

If so, then the XPrize served its purpose - to drive innovation.

I am not under the impression that XPrizes are intended to be impossible goals or "holy grails" - just goals that drive progress.

[francis88]

I respectfully disagree. As far as I understand, it is not about Q&A/jeopardy kind of context. It's about generating a TED speech that would involve deep domain expertise but more importantly tone and speech technics to make it great to hear...

[skosuri]

I think XPrize lost a lot of credibility when the pulled the Genomics X-prize because the competition was "outpaced by innovation" [1].

[1] http://genomics.xprize.org/

[smd4]

I'm surprised that for a mere $10M they were willing to simultaneously torpedo the xprize brand and forever enshrine their irrelevance to actual innovation.

[moron4hire]

Easy. TED Talks are already ALICEbots trained on BuzzFeed articles anyway.

[jotux]

Has it been confirmed that Reggie Watts is not a robot and has not already won this prize?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdHK_r9RXTc

[jere]

That video is the perfect response for why this is a silly idea. A clever chat bot can beat the Turing test, but in a TED talk you don't even have to deal with probing questions. All you have to do is babble on about something vaguely inspiring.

[Scienz]

Yeah, I was already wondering how they were going to reconcile that particular speech with whatever nuances of the prize rules would be required to keep people from giving a speech like that one.

It gets weirder when you consider that a) an AI could have plausibly (though not likely) have generated such a speech in answer to a real question (for example, "discuss a flaw in the TED program", and b) no one rejected Watts' talk as unacceptable, though they probably would have if an AI had generated the same talk.

[nsxwolf]

Since a TED talk is not interactive, what does that even mean? My TI-99/4A with Speech Synthesizer could give a TED talk.

[arjie]

Here's the procedure I followed:

1. Pick two keywords that describe this event. "TED" and "XPrize" seem like good candidates since they (together) identify this.

2. Go to Google (in a private browsing window, if you wish non-bubble results) and type in these keywords together. Here is an example URL: https://www.google.com/search?q=TED+Xprize . Order is irrelevant so long as phrases are maintained as phrases.

3. Click the first non-ad result: http://www.xprize.org/ted

4. Observe that the page says that the rules are not yet set in stone but that a 'sample' exists: http://www.xprize.org/ted-rules

5. Follow that link to reach a page which says that "...the competing A.I. is given 30 minutes to prepare a compelling 3 min TED Talk" once it receives a subject.

The conclusion is the following:

The AI must actually construct the TED Talk, i.e. the words of the TED Talk must be programmatically constructed given a topic.

This being the case, I doubt your TI-99/4A would deliver a performance compelling enough to stand and applaud. While I'm sure you searched before asking the question, I hope that this guide helped you construct your search for information better.

[pjmorris]

Did anybody else think 'I bet we could retrain the Hacker News headline generator with past TED talks?'

[Houshalter]

That's just a really simple markov chain generator. If someone could get a bunch of transcripts of TED talks in plain text, this would be pretty straightforward.

[lnanek2]

> All of this must be accomplished with no human interaction with the mechanical being.

Well that makes things much easier. Answering questions without giving the game away would be impossible, after all. Generating an expert system to just walk around and generate a passing talk without any interaction is pretty easy, though.

[kens]

How many humans could get a standing ovation for a TED talk on an arbitrary subject after 30 minutes preparation? I know I couldn't. It seems bizarre to create an AI challenge that most people couldn't meet.

I wonder how far you could get, though, with an AI that strung together phrases like a struggling beauty pageant contestant or politician: "I think world peace is important because uh education is the key to success and uh what really matters is the children and uh that's what makes America great!"

[lutusp]

> I wonder how far you could get, though, with an AI that strung together phrases like a struggling beauty pageant contestant or politician: "I think world peace is important because uh education is the key to success and uh what really matters is the children and uh that's what makes America great!"

Hmm -- you clearly haven't listened to many TED talks, because lots of them sound just like that. Having listened to about 100 of them over the years, I eventually came to the conclusion that the most popular ones acquired their acclaim by being as formulaic as possible -- say positive things, don't mystify your audience, build your talk out of a series of verbal bumperstickers.

[al2o3cr]

Moar like "artificial non-intelligence", you mean.

On the upside, the people who would lose their jobs to a robot that could actually climb up its own asshole would be REALLY shocked. :)

[lutusp]

Yes, this should work, because the organizers have a realistic grasp of (a) the present state of AI, and (b) the low intellectual level required for a typical TED talk.

[xamdam]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02bwfcV2h9A

[weirdkid]

So, in other words, an AI that can pitch a book?

[mark_l_watson]

For this to be valid, the robot would have to take a wide variety of questions from the audience and provide good answers.

[georgemcbay]

They should have a sub-prize where if you can make an AI that can give a TEDx talk, you get like 1% of the full prize.

[PaulHoule]

Couldn't Miku Hatsune do this now?

[njharman]

Artificial charisma is what's need for talk.

[mihaialin]

Yes that's true, but I think that we are far away from being able to create artificial charisma, it is pretty hard to write a machine learning algorithm that can mimic emotions.

[sorindumi]

Fascinating!