Ask HN: Is InspiroBot a real AI?

  • I'm fairly certain it isn't. It's phrases are repeated, certain nouns or other parts of speech are used way more than I would imagine a neural network would be limited to.

  • I think this may be the latest in a long tradition of fake AI, dating back to the original Mechanical Turk (chess-playing automaton with a man inside).

    There are a few recognizable madlibs-like patterns. For example: "Unleashing bad karma is a joke where the punchline is that you get very, very sick", and "Realizing the full potential of hell is a joke where the punchline is that you fake your own death". Occasionally the photos repeat as well.

    But if they're all written using a fill-in-the-blanks format, there must be an enormous number of templates. Maybe they analyze thousands of famous quotes and randomly replace various parts of speech.

    While InspiroBot may be AI-assisted, I suspect the quotes are largely human-written, or at least heavily curated. Maybe this is my anthropocentrism speaking, but most of them seem too good to be AI-written. They don't have that meandering pointlessness of most AI poetry.

    For example, "The things we find beautiful are actually just thoughts circling a fire." Or, "Could it be that eternal particles are eternal particles because you're overthinking things?"

    Or my favorite: "Science is just mother nature playing with herself."

    (My modest contribution to the fake AI genre was a song-creation program called "Turd Polisher Pro", released on April Fool's Day, 2010. The web page included "before" and "after" sound files that demonstrated how the program can automatically turn a drunken voicemail message into a polished, commercial piece of music. Of course, the song was written first; the drunken voicemail recording reused some of the same phrases and themes.)

  • I'm also interested in this question, chiefly because the quotes do not seem purely "random", as some media are describing them - even in the sense of syntactically correct but random - and because there doesn't appear to be readily available information from the creators.