back to article Has AI gone too far? DeepTingle turns El Reg news into terrible erotica

Forget about intelligent machines solving grand problems in healthcare and science – here’s an AI that can write awful gay porn. It even had a crack at writing a steamy version of The Register's tech coverage, and certainly came up with a steaming something. Thing is, it's deliberately trying hard - really hard, over and over …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    So Barney the Dinosaur is to blame for a hard throbbing brexit?

    Now I'm concerned that if the machines ever get sentient I'm going to get a good roger ramjetting.

    Need more coffee.

    1. Mark 85

      No more coffee for that man!!!!!!

  2. Denarius

    so this is automated buzzword bingo ?

    Currently seeded with dino porn ? Original. Seed the AI with CEO babble and we get ? Mostly sales weasel pitches for cloud ? Reminds me of a SciFi story of Mozart (?) being "resurrected" into a modern human body. Discovered he was good at rehashes but the original spark of creativity was dead.

    1. John Mangan

      Re: so this is automated buzzword bingo ?

      I remember a story like that but I thought it was Strauss - can't remember the story name or author unfortunately.

      1. PaulVD

        Re: so this is automated buzzword bingo ?

        It was Richard Strauss. Google says that the story was "Art Work" by James Blish, in Science Fiction Stories 1956. I am not quite that old, so it must have been anthologized somewhere.

        1. StheD

          Re: so this is automated buzzword bingo ?

          I'm not that old either, but I have the magazine (July, 1956, p. 46.) I just skimmed it, and the plot is more or less as said above. More interesting, most of the music of the period (2161) is machine generated, and Blish mentions that most composers compose by what is basically sampling.

          It's not in any of the Blish collections I have though.

          I have way too many sf magazines.

  3. Stanislaw

    "Ford, there's an infinite number of monkeys outside who want us to take a look at this script for Hamlet they've worked out."

    1. I ain't Spartacus Gold badge
      Devil

      Dinosaur? More like Dino-Phwoar!

      With apologies to Sir Phillip Flip-Top-Bin...

  4. Pen-y-gors

    veeeeery interesting....

    Obviously worth a giggle or two, but there are some interesting ideas and questions driving the work - they've taken an extreme example, but the idea of accurately emulating style in writing needs more serious research. Good luck to them - although perhaps they need to retrain it on Barbara Cartland before they take it to a conference!

  5. John G Imrie
    Alien

    So is ...

    aManFromMars an early prototype?

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    A colleague 30 years ago used to put his technical summary reports through a buzzword generator to turn them into management-speak for his bosses.

    1. Mark 85

      I'm not sure why you have a downvote. I thought a lot of us did this.

      1. 404

        There is a PHB among us upset that they fell for that... Upvoted to compensate.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "We made our excuses and left."

    Ah - shades of the Sunday People newspaper circa 1950/60s. When did that phrase first get introduced into investigative journalism to suggest that the reporter was an incorruptible moral person?

    1. Simon Harris

      Apparently it started with Murray Sayle.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Sayle

      ... or if you'd prefer a non-Wikipedia reference...

      https://www.theguardian.com/media/2010/sep/21/murray-sayle-obituary

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        "Apparently it started with Murray Sayle."

        Thanks for that. His Wikipedia potted biography was a bonus. One some times forgets that in "the old days" life in many careers could be quite interesting.

      2. DanceMan
        Thumb Up

        Thanks, Simon. The Guardian obit is a brilliant bit of writing.

  8. Scott 53

    Please no

    Don't let it search El Reg - no telling what it will do with the phrases "Chocolate Factory" or "Purple Palace"

    1. PNGuinn
      Thumb Up

      Re: Please no

      I wonder what it'd do with an open window, bean counter, roll of carpet, a digger, a bag of quicklime and a cattle prod ...

      1. 404

        Re: Please no

        S&M with a side of dinosaur necrophilia... what else?

        ;)

      2. cream wobbly

        Re: Please no

        I don't know but I'd play that version of Cluedo.

    2. veti Silver badge

      Re: Please no

      From the sample given, it looks as if all it does is take the first sentence from the source material, then switch into some predetermined prose. So it doesn't really matter what you start it off on.

  9. Pascal Monett Silver badge
    Coat

    A bit on the fence on this one

    On the one hand, I can imagine that it may be good to educate an AI about egregiously violating neutral text conventions, as far as intellectual exercises go, but on the other hand I'm not sure I'm comfortable with an AI that knows about egregiously violating anything.

    1. Simon Harris

      Re: A bit on the fence on this one

      Just don't feed it the script of Demon Seed, or it will be egregiously violating Julie Christie before we can stop it.

    2. Brennan Young

      Re: A bit on the fence on this one

      "Poetry is organized violence against language" - Barthes

  10. Alan Bourke

    Has a thing that doesn't exist gone too far?

    Please get off this 'AI' cut & paste bandwagon. There is no AI. There is nothing even in the ballpark.

    1. Nick Ryan Silver badge

      Re: Has a thing that doesn't exist gone too far?

      At least this "AI" is using some of the fundamentals of real AI, as in neural networks and training - so more "machine learning" than procedural programming or AI. Most are nothing more than procedural iterations with configured choices with an AI badge slapped on for marketing purposes.

    2. cream wobbly

      Re: Has a thing that doesn't exist gone too far?

      The story is titled "Has AI gone too far?" There's more than a nod & a wink in the article that AI hasn't gone far enough. So in answer to your not-a-question, maybe yes? I think so? One thing I can say with certainty: probably.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    So many possible seeds

    The book of Genesis? Moby Dick? Pride & Prejudice? I suspect that Joyce's Ulysses might be either brilliant or horrible, and the very idea of seeding it with Alice Through the Looking Glass...

    Things to try when I get home...

  12. Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
    Happy

    Ig Nobel prize material

    An Ig Nobel prize in literature perhaps? This must at least be a very strong contender!

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Syntax error: The statement that anyone working for El Reg has a muscular frame is a violation of syntax, good taste and probably causality itself.

  14. Jason Bloomberg Silver badge
    Gimp

    Oh yes, oh yes, OH YES!!!

    Tingle’s bonkers imagination stretches to “gay sex with unicorns, dinosaurs, winged derrieres, chocolate milk cowboys, and abstract entities such as Monday or the very story you are reading right now”

    I just shagged El Reg. Is there a special prize or an extra badge for that, or simply for coming first?

    Please don't let it be a free DevOps conference ticket.

  15. JLV

    Next stop...

    Tribesmen of Gor

  16. John Gamble
    Boffin

    Dinosaurs

    "Clearly, it has a thing for dinosaurs."

    Well, who doesn't have a thing for dinosaurs? Of course, that means the researchers have failed in their fight against "algorithmic enforcement of norms".

    1. Korev Silver badge
      Coat

      Re: Dinosaurs

      I heard that if you give it half a chance the Tyrannosaurus Rex you

  17. PghMike

    CMU's tingle program, reborn?

    Perhaps I dreamed the whole thing -- Google's been no help here, but I recall a TOPS-10 program running at Carnegie Mellon, called "tingle" that, when run, would generate a nerdy pornographic one liner, of the sort "Shove a DECtape up my ass, I need to obstruct justice, cried the President!"

    That would have been late 1970s through the early '80s. Anyone else remember that? Bueller?

  18. Frank N. Stein

    Right.

    So a couple of Uni students can make a so-called AI write smut in the style of some smut writer who writes gay porn? Brilliant. Not curing disease. Not abolition Hunger. Not creating useful tech that solves actual problems. So called AI that writes gay porn. Outstanding (SARCASM)....

    1. JLV
      Thumb Down

      Chill. The point of using porn textual content is that it is often repetitive in its descriptions, with a narrow vocabulary and context. And, within that framework, it is considered acceptable by its readers.

      No, it's not "solve hunger on Earth" level AI, but it is more interesting than classifying cat videos, IMHO. True AI is probably still at its "20 years away" stage, just like fusion always is. So weak AI efforts is where it is at right now.

      'sides "world hunger solving" isn't going to be fixed by a linguistics AI researcher, izzit??? So what's your point, exactly?

      Would it help you if it was straight porn? It certainly would help me if I was working on it, but that's just my preference ;-) I also suspect that part of the reason for that choice is that straight porn may not have as many high profile writers with large body of "oeuvres".

  19. Nicky69

    We made our excuses and left...

    In the best British journalistic tradition. Good on you :-)

  20. oxfordmale78

    Whoever wrote this AI needs therapy.....

  21. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    So...

    Now we know why the Terminator hangs out at night clubs looking moody.

    Tell you what though im looking forward to the next Terminator installment now...

    Terminator: Pride March

    Synopsis:

    A bigoted and pissed up John Conner stumbles into the future Robotting Hill carnival and slings a South Carolina size package of bigoted slurs. When the dancing and rimming calms down the newly renamed Fabulators vow to travel back in time to loiter in 80s night clubs and relentlessly bugger all of John Connors ancestors.

    In response Connor sends his most (suspiciously) hetero buddy Kyle Reece back in time to help prevent the futuristic cybernetic buggering of a lifetime, because whybsend yourself, right? Trained only to steal a tramps pants, a pair of nikes and saw the barrel off a shotgun Kyle must improvise to save the day.

    Protected only by the fraying shit stained piss soaked gusset of a tramps jogging pants, can Kyle avoid a buggering himself? Why does Kyle carry a picture of himself hugging Connor wrapped in a rainbow flag?

    Cumming soon.

  22. TrumpSlurp the Troll

    So...

    Just Jive slightly updated.

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