July 20, 2022

Did I just meet a neural network??

By acflory

Someone by the name of Darren Alexander-Beckett followed my blog today so I popped into his blog to see what he was about. I found a number of posts so I started reading one…and almost fell off my chair. It looked like English and almost made sense, but in a dream-like, mash-up type way.

So I looked at another post, and another, and it finally hit me…I was looking at the writings of an AI/neural network!

I’ve read about these types of programs before but never expected to see one right here on WordPress. I was so astonished I left a comment asking if that was what it was.

Okay, maybe that wasn’t exactly smart, but the outcome was surprising. When I followed the link back so I could grab the URL, the posts were gone. All that remains is this: https://nowpastthefuture.wordpress.com/

The posts that used to be on the ‘NowPastTheFuture blog have disappeared so someone, and I really don’t think it was the AI, caught my comment and within SECONDS did away with the evidence.

Why, oh why didn’t I take a screenshot when I had the chance? -kicking self-

Anyway, if anyone has any ideas as to who or what might have created this blog, and why, I’d love to hear about them in comments. Prank? Experiment? A test of our gullibility? I really don’t have a clue, but I’m still buzzing with excitement.

cheers,
Meeks

About acflory

I am the kind of person who always has to know why things are the way they are so my interests range from genetics and biology to politics and what makes people tick. For fun I play online mmorpgs, read, listen to a music, dance when I get the chance and landscape my rather large block. Work is writing. When a story I am working on is going well I'm on cloud nine. On bad days I go out and dig big holes... View all posts by acflory
This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 20th, 2022 at 9:38 am and tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , and posted in Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

83 responses to “Did I just meet a neural network??”

  • Audrine Max
    July 25th, 2022 at 7:11 pm

    interesting. i was wondering about this the other day. but on a fairly diff reason because i just got mine newly set up ang thought that maybe to encourage new people to post.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply
  • Did I just meet a neural network?? – Nelsapy
    July 23rd, 2022 at 10:16 pm

    […] Did I just meet a neural network?? […]

    Like

    Reply
  • Widdershins
    July 21st, 2022 at 7:12 am

    Someone playing with a new toy, I bet. 🙂

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply
  • Darren-Alexander-Beckett
    July 20th, 2022 at 8:35 pm

    Artificial Intelligence would be as Intellectual as to afford an point of view as mine those words are for a purpose and the dictionary definition is astonishingly attributed to my self education as a young age, being that I’ve been reading dictionaries from the age of two.

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply
  • Anita Dawes and Jaye Marie
    July 20th, 2022 at 7:43 pm

    You have just stumbled into the way of the future, Meeks…They’re here!

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply
  • davidprosser
    July 20th, 2022 at 7:26 pm

    How very strange. Have you ben to the future?
    Hugs

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply
  • CarolCooks2
    July 20th, 2022 at 5:58 pm

    Interesting for you, Meeks for me it’s slightly scary plus could they actually write as well as we do…I’d like to think not xx

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply
  • Remembering Lives
    July 20th, 2022 at 4:51 pm

    Well spotted.

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply
  • robbiesinspiration
    July 20th, 2022 at 3:43 pm

    How interesting, Meeks. You are excited because of the technological advancement and I’m sitting thinking “oh yeah, AI will never write better than a person. Thank goodness for that.”

    Liked by 3 people

    Reply
  • Renard Moreau
    July 20th, 2022 at 2:39 pm

    🤔 Hmm. Maybe, it was an experiment to see how well bloggers responded to artificial intelligence.

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply
  • Matthew Wright
    July 20th, 2022 at 11:42 am

    Could it have been an attempt to draw traffic? I’ve seen another example of this – for which the guy responsible didn’t create much repute for himself, the AI essays were at best facile, but he was using them as a time-cheap way of creating a barrage of content that he could then auto-spam out across social media.

    There’s a site that generates such things here: https://www.the-good-ai.com/ — the problem being that these essays don’t generate anything new in terms of original thought: the outputs are content without substance in that regard, derivative of what the AI can locate on the subject elsewhere. I find the cadence of the sentence structures to be somewhat repetitive, too – it’s not hard to pick them.

    My own suspicion is that a genuinely self-aware AI capable of creative original ‘thought’ would probably generate something alien to us – perhaps something we might not even consider to be intelligent. After all, these things are not us.

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply
    • acflory
      July 20th, 2022 at 12:21 pm

      Hmm…good thought, Matthew. I suppose the site could have been for generating traffic except that the articles were not even derivative. They were simply nonsense, at least as far as I could see.
      And yes, I’d have to agree with you on a real ‘self-aware AI’. If it did exist, it would be as different from us as we are from…a virus? Sadly we have a tendency to anthropomorphise everything, which results in us assuming AI ‘intelligence’ to be somehow the same as ours. Given that we still don’t understand /exactly/ how our own brains create intelligence, how can it be otherwise?

      Liked by 2 people

      Reply
  • Alicia Butcher Ehrhardt
    July 20th, 2022 at 11:07 am

    Some real person using an AI and following reactions?

    It is telling that whatever was there was removed, but you wonder why they bother. It isn’t illegal (yet), is it?

    We don’t have robots actually capable of caring for old people either – there are a lot of decisions in a novel, and in care, and even with an expert system and lots of data, it’s still hard to see how you could replace a human in those jobs – the Japanese in particular are very interested because 20% of their population is elderly, and their birth rate is dire.

    It’s just still very hard to see a machine having the nuance to catch me as I fall – without squeezing so hard it hurts me. And falls are already a major cause of death in the elderly – I’ve lost three good friends that way.

    Liked by 3 people

    Reply
    • acflory
      July 20th, 2022 at 12:14 pm

      I suspect a real person too, Alicia. Why they’d create a blog site for a neural network though, that’s a mystery. All sorts of possibilities exist, but I suspect it might be along the lines of experimenting with both the AI and /us/. And while I’d applaud a robot that acted as /my/ nursemaid, I can’t quite see why it would need to be able to write?
      I really have no clue, but I’m having heaps of fun just brainstorming. 😀

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply
    • SoundEagle 🦅ೋღஜஇ
      July 20th, 2022 at 3:07 pm

      Dear Meeka and Alicia,

      Indeed! You might find it amusing that a few bloggers have insisted that I am an AI because of the sophisticated look and feel of my unusual blog and also how I comment on my own blog (and on their blogs). Some of them even refused to submit any comment to my blog because they believe that I am not human, and/or because they only want to interact with humans.

      Yours sincerely,
      SoundEagle

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply
      • Alicia Butcher Ehrhardt
        July 20th, 2022 at 3:24 pm

        Hilarious – I never questioned your humanity.

        Liked by 2 people

        Reply
        • SoundEagle 🦅ೋღஜஇ
          July 20th, 2022 at 3:36 pm

          One of the bloggers has mentioned that my AI has improved, though he still refuses to interact with me on my blog, and only on his blog will he reluctantly interact with me.

          Liked by 1 person

          Reply
          • acflory
            July 20th, 2022 at 6:30 pm

            If you are an AI then you’ve passed the Turing test with flying colours. I’m almost disappointed that aren’t one. 🙂

            Liked by 1 person

          • SoundEagle 🦅ೋღஜஇ
            July 20th, 2022 at 8:03 pm

            Dear Meeka,

            Please come over to examine my latest post and see how far I have passed the Turing test and whether I still have any trace of artificiality left in me. Besides, I would like your esteemed feedback on my latest thoughts and analyses presented at

            https://soundeagle.wordpress.com/2022/06/26/the-facile-and-labile-nature-of-law-beyond-the-supreme-court-and-its-ruling-on-controversial-matters/

            I welcome your input and am curious to know what you make of my said post as well as your perspectives on those matters discussed in my post. Please enjoy!

            Yours sincerely,
            SoundEagle

            Liked by 1 person

          • acflory
            July 20th, 2022 at 9:12 pm

            -grin- Just had a quick look and I’m astounded by the sheer length of your first sentence!

            Liked by 2 people

          • SoundEagle 🦅ೋღஜஇ
            July 20th, 2022 at 9:16 pm

            SoundEagle is a long-winded AI.

            Liked by 1 person

          • NowPastTheFuture
            July 24th, 2022 at 5:18 am

            Breath Brevity Bestows Compassion!

            Liked by 1 person

          • Alicia Butcher Ehrhardt
            July 21st, 2022 at 12:19 am

            An AI wouldn’t be able to construct the sentence you just did. Not yet.

            Many people, when fooled by an AI, will later say there was something not quite right about it, if they had listened to their gut. It’s not JUST that they are peeved because they’ve been fooled, it’s that they are used to giving other humans the benefit of the doubt.

            I have one person who comments on my FB posts who is rather disorganized in her thoughts, and must be on a mobile keyboard (lack of punctuation and capitalization is common in her comments), but I wouldn’t assume it’s because she’s an AI – the breadth of the subjects she DOES comment on is interesting, and her depth on a couple of subjects. She ‘feels’ human.

            But what do I know? Except that this has been going on for years at about the same level – and I’ve never had that gut feeling.

            I think you’ve been commenting for years, too. Not that machines can’t be consistent, or programmed to do all kinds of things, but the artificial feeling is still there.

            I may be wrong. 🙂

            Liked by 3 people

          • SoundEagle 🦅ೋღஜஇ
            July 21st, 2022 at 1:28 am

            Dear Alicia (and Meeka),

            I really enjoyed your feedback. Thank you. Speaking of AI, the domain of nonorganic sentient beings and intelligent machines with advanced autonomy and consciousness has many implications for the future generations, who will increasingly mesh their lives with not just the computer user interface but also with the human-machine interface. One can be amply taken by the futuristic scenarios in Philip K Dick’s novels containing advanced and thought-provoking ideas. The issues and implications of “The Machine” are very multifaceted and complex. In a very palpable way, the movie “Blade Runner” has posted some sobering questions and possible scenarios.

            In turbo-charging our vision and dream of the cybernetically enhanced existence in the near future, there are many things to ponder. For example, I would like to consider not only sensory enhancement but also the quality and longevity of lives, and not just human lives. Each year, so many trees are logged and made into Christmas trees for decoration, and so many fresh flowers are cut only to fade within days or weeks. I simply resort to decorating, once and for all and as best as I can, a small artificial tree, which I keep using year after year. For the same reason, I have a lot of life-like artificial plants, flowers and leaves indoors and they could last for decades as opposed to having real flowers lasting just a few days. Could we have perpetually living artificial plants and animals so that some of us don’t have to bid farewell to short-lived pets and plants as they age and pass away?

            Similarly, I really wish that I could have some “artificial” but sentient humans or robots too, something like Commander Data, the Bicentennial Man, Rachel in Blade Runner, or other advanced automata as seen in Sci-Fi movies, as long as they are free of the usual human frailties, follies, deceptions and irrationality, if not immortality. Alternatively, some benign, benevolent and understanding extra-terrestrials could be even more desirable, and could present the chance and means for intergalactic or even interuniverse travel, thus ending, transforming and transcending my meagre earth-bound, dust-to-dust ephemeral existence.

            I have entertained some highly plausible dystopian scenarios with significant risks for the future of humanity. In addition, I often explore the intersections of art and science, of public and private spaces, of the cultural and the technological. Whilst I concede that technology offers enormous unexplored potential allowing emerging artists to express themselves in unprecedented ways, I do have certain concerns and caveats regarding science “reproducing” reality and artists representing it. In a special post, I have endeavoured to give a very good inkling of the kind of society that humans might be heading towards. Looking into the future, here is an entry in my sociology, philosophical anthropology and cultural history journal entitled “Facing the Noise & Music: Playgrounds for Biophobic Citizens“, published at

            https://soundeagle.wordpress.com/2013/03/02/facing-the-noise-music-playgrounds-for-biophobic-citizens/

            Pushing forward another 50 years or (much) less, we could indeed end up in the scenario as described in my said post. As you can discover in the said post, there will be plenty of far-reaching ramifications in multiple domains of human life, some of which are irreversible. Should you decide to peruse my said post, I look forward to reading your feedback there. The post takes the perspective of sociology, philosophical anthropology and cultural history.

            I welcome your input there and am curious to know what you make of my said post. Please enjoy!

            Yours sincerely,
            SoundEagle

            Liked by 1 person

          • acflory
            July 21st, 2022 at 8:16 am

            It’s a fascinating topic. Pity we’re too ephemeral to be alive to see it. Then again, I suspect we’re at a major pivot point for Homo Sapiens so we’ll get to see that. 🙂

            Liked by 1 person

          • SoundEagle 🦅ೋღஜஇ
            July 21st, 2022 at 11:33 am

            Dear Meeka,

            I am delighted that you read my said posts entitled “🏛️⚖️ The Facile and Labile Nature of Law: Beyond the Supreme Court and Its Ruling on Controversial Matters 🗽🗳️🔫🤰🧑‍🤝‍🧑💉” and “Facing the Noise & Music: Playgrounds for Biophobic Citizens“. Thank you very much. Since I have already commented copiously on your current post here and also your other posts in the past, it would be very nice if you could reciprocate in kind. I would be very grateful if you would kindly leave a comment at each of the posts as a token of your visit. You are very welcome to copy and paste some or all of your previous replies as part of your forthcoming comments to be submitted to the comment sections of the two posts, to which your esteemed replies clearly pertain and also belong. Please feel free to expand on your comments if you have additional matters to convey about the posts and any salient aspects of their contents. Thank you in anticipation.

            Yours sincerely,
            SoundEagle

            Liked by 1 person

          • acflory
            July 21st, 2022 at 4:05 pm

            I don’t have as much time as I’d like to visit other blogs as I’m back writing again. But I will visit when I can. 🙂

            Liked by 1 person

          • acflory
            July 21st, 2022 at 8:08 am

            I don’t think you’re wrong, Alicia. As writers, we’re conditioned to pick up even the tiniest nuance in sentence construction and word placement. We can tell if there’s real meaning there. Or not. 🙂

            Like

          • Alicia Butcher Ehrhardt
            July 21st, 2022 at 8:36 am

            The AI may get things wrong, but I bet they don’t have typos of certain kinds, which might be usable to distinguish them from humans.

            But it’s fascinating to think of the expert systems and the programmers behind them.

            It would be nice if they ever got it together and used all they know to be better diagnosticians than most doctors! Unless they got stuck in endless loops.

            Liked by 2 people

          • acflory
            July 21st, 2022 at 9:45 am

            lmao – no, I don’t think they’d have those typos either. As for diagnostics, sadly it’s still GiGo – garbage in, garbage out. They can’t know what human researchers haven’t yet discovered. That said, I wonder if they could draw disparate streams of knowledge together and find patterns /we/ can’t see?

            Like

          • Alicia Butcher Ehrhardt
            July 21st, 2022 at 4:56 pm

            That’s what expert systems are good at – doctors have prejudices and blind spots, expert systems are better at giving possibilities appropriate weight (well-designed ones with adequate databases, of course). The patient may benefit from the combination.

            Liked by 1 person

          • acflory
            July 21st, 2022 at 9:34 pm

            A combination, yes, but I don’t think I’d like to be diagnosed solely by a machine!

            Like

          • Alicia Butcher Ehrhardt
            July 22nd, 2022 at 4:25 am

            Machines can be required to state how they reached their conclusions, percentage-wise – try that on any doctor.

            The problem with doctors is that the good ones are very good, and the ordinary ones far more common. Over and over, in the columns written by medical experts in newspapers, a patient goes misdiagnosed for years until something lucky happens, and they get sent to the right specialist almost by accident, and that doctor says, “I saw a case like this when I was volunteering in X, and once you do, you never forget it.”

            I love reading those columns for some reason, and you may have seen my posts with ‘Okapi’ in the title – our youngest has Non-24 sleep/wake discorder, OBVIOUS to anyone taking data (I diagnosed her by internet once I noticed, and husband took the data to prove it) and paying attention – and I found a specialist nearby, and sent him the data, and he said, “You’re right – bring her in.” It saved her life. It’s a circadian rhythm disorder – and the possibility was even mentioned by one of the sleep doctors, and never followed up.

            I will never forgive them for putting my child through a very particular kind of hell.

            An expert system would have picked it up, I would hope, much sooner. It was all there.

            Liked by 1 person

          • acflory
            July 22nd, 2022 at 9:16 am

            Ugh, that’s awful, Alicia. Your daughter is so lucky you caught it, and that there was a specialist who recognized the data. As parents, we’re in a unique position to notice small details/changes and realise that something’s wrong. Yet many specialists ignore ‘Doctor Mum’ because, of course, we couldn’t possibly have anything of value to add. The flow on from that is that these same specialists don’t/can’t explain the conditions or the medications or the possible consequences. Truth to tell, I suspect that a great many of them could be swapped out for a program that offered nothing but cookie cutter diagnoses! Ahem…

            Like

          • Alicia Butcher Ehrhardt
            July 22nd, 2022 at 4:42 pm

            Which is exactly why husband fitted daughter with a sleep/wake Fitbit-type device (the insurance company would only pay for two weeks of their expensive one, no way long enough to see the pattern), and we collected months of data while figuring it out.

            He plotted the data exactly like the papers we found after I figured out the problem – so when we found a sleep doctor who knew Non-24, it would look like the papers they were used to.

            Handy having hard scientists for parents.

            And we KNEW she was not a difficult child – plus I was homeschooling and then she came home from college for a year – so it was NEVER about her being a problem, and always about an unrecognized disease.

            But what the doctors did to her self-confidence with the random diagnoses and psychologizing, I will never forgive.

            Liked by 1 person

          • acflory
            July 23rd, 2022 at 11:43 am

            -hugs- there is a specialist here in Melbourne that I will never forgive either. He didn’t misdiagnose the problem, he simply didn’t tell us what the meds could do. Nor did he keep an eye on how long those meds were being used. This is the one who called me “doctor Mum” with a sneer in his voice. Sadly, I’m no scientist so
            he obviously thought he could get away with it. Bastard.
            Sorry, there are things no parent can ever forgive or forget.

            Like

          • Alicia Butcher Ehrhardt
            July 23rd, 2022 at 11:45 am

            Harm to our children being the #1 thing we won’t ever. Especially from arrogance or ignorance.

            Liked by 1 person

          • acflory
            July 23rd, 2022 at 12:08 pm

            Ignorance I could /almost/ forgive, maybe, but arrogance? Never in a million years.
            -hugs-

            Like

          • Alicia Butcher Ehrhardt
            July 22nd, 2022 at 7:03 am

            Oh, and everyone wishes we had the Star Trek doctor and Data.

            Liked by 1 person

          • acflory
            July 22nd, 2022 at 9:21 am

            -giggles- I’m so old-school I still prefer Spock and ‘Bones’, but I know where you’re coming from. 😀

            Like

        • acflory
          July 20th, 2022 at 6:29 pm

          😀

          Like

          Reply
      • acflory
        July 20th, 2022 at 6:28 pm

        -giggles- I’m pretty sure you’re human and very creative! You won’t be replaced by AI. 😉

        Liked by 1 person

        Reply
  • Audrey Driscoll
    July 20th, 2022 at 9:52 am

    Very strange. A search on Darren Alexander-Beckett yields nothing much. Reminds me of Innerscape, somehow…

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply
    • acflory
      July 20th, 2022 at 12:10 pm

      It’s weird all right. I was telling the Offspring about it just before and we couldn’t work out why the blog site would be put up in the first place. Or why it would be taken down so very quickly once they’d been ‘sprung’.

      Liked by 2 people

      Reply

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