7 ms·

XPrize up for Artificial Intelligence that can give a TED talk

78 points by mihaialin 13y ago

sorindumi 13y ago
Fascinating!
electrograv 13y ago
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 http://www.xprize.org/ted-rules [2] http://cleverbot.com http://cleverbot.com [3] http://www.geekosystem.com/journal-accepts-nonsense-paper/ http://www.geekosystem.com/journal-accepts-nonsense-paper/ [4] https://www.facebook.com/publications/546316888800776/ https://www.facebook.com/publications/546316888800776/ [5] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.84.1887 http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.84.1...
- francis88 13y ago
  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...
  - thefreeman 13y ago
    What is preventing them from just playing back a pre recorded speech from a human?
    - TophWells 13y ago
      The topic isn't known in advance. The robot has to prepare a speech on a specified topic without human interaction.
- zhte415 13y ago
  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.
- krynsky 13y ago
  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.
- codingdave 13y ago
  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.
PaulHoule 13y ago
Couldn't Miku Hatsune do this now?
moron4hire 13y ago
Easy. TED Talks are already ALICEbots trained on BuzzFeed articles anyway.
pjmorris 13y ago
Did anybody else think 'I bet we could retrain the Hacker News headline generator with past TED talks?'
- Houshalter 13y ago
  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 13y ago
> 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.
xamdam 13y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02bwfcV2h9A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02bwfcV2h9A
nsxwolf 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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 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 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 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.
  - nsxwolf 13y ago
    Yes, thank you for Googling that for me. I think it's better to include at least some of those facts in the article, though.
    - arjie 12y ago
      Ha ha, certainly, that would have been nice. I'm disappointed that I didn't even draw a chuckle. After all, I'm a human posting a mechanical sounding comment on a thread about machines speaking like humans.
jotux 13y ago
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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdHK_r9RXTc
- jere 13y ago
  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 13y ago
  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.
njharman 13y ago
Artificial charisma is what's need for talk.
- mihaialin 13y ago
  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.
al2o3cr 13y ago
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. :)
weirdkid 13y ago
So, in other words, an AI that can pitch a book?
lutusp 13y ago
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.
skosuri 13y ago
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/ http://genomics.xprize.org/
- smd4 13y ago
  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.
mark_l_watson 13y ago
For this to be valid, the robot would have to take a wide variety of questions from the audience and provide good answers.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
kens 13y ago
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 13y ago
  > 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.
georgemcbay 13y ago
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.

78 points by mihaialin 13y ago

Fascinating!

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 http://www.xprize.org/ted-rules [2] http://cleverbot.com http://cleverbot.com [3] http://www.geekosystem.com/journal-accepts-nonsense-paper/ http://www.geekosystem.com/journal-accepts-nonsense-paper/ [4] https://www.facebook.com/publications/546316888800776/ https://www.facebook.com/publications/546316888800776/ [5] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.84.1887 http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.84.1...

francis88 13y ago
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...
- thefreeman 13y ago
  What is preventing them from just playing back a pre recorded speech from a human?
  - TophWells 13y ago
    The topic isn't known in advance. The robot has to prepare a speech on a specified topic without human interaction.
zhte415 13y ago
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.
krynsky 13y ago
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.
codingdave 13y ago
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.

PaulHoule 13y ago

Couldn't Miku Hatsune do this now?

moron4hire 13y ago

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

pjmorris 13y ago

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

Houshalter 13y ago
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 13y ago

> 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.

xamdam 13y ago

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

nsxwolf 13y ago

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 13y ago
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 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 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 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.
- nsxwolf 13y ago
  Yes, thank you for Googling that for me. I think it's better to include at least some of those facts in the article, though.
  - arjie 12y ago
    Ha ha, certainly, that would have been nice. I'm disappointed that I didn't even draw a chuckle. After all, I'm a human posting a mechanical sounding comment on a thread about machines speaking like humans.

jotux 13y ago

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

jere 13y ago
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 13y ago
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.

njharman 13y ago

Artificial charisma is what's need for talk.

mihaialin 13y ago
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.

al2o3cr 13y ago

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. :)

weirdkid 13y ago

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

lutusp 13y ago

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.

skosuri 13y ago

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/ http://genomics.xprize.org/

smd4 13y ago
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.

mark_l_watson 13y ago

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

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

kens 13y ago

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 13y ago
> 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.

georgemcbay 13y ago

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.