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" The headline from The Onion read: &amp;quot;World&amp;#039;s Supercomputers Release Study Confirming They Are Not Powerful Enough.&amp;quot; The mock article went on to describe how the Earth&amp;#039;s most advanced computers, acting in perfect unison, had concluded that people must provide them with more data storage and processing power\u2014immediately. We expect transparently self-serving arguments from industry lobbyists in Washington, DC. But could a machine really convince us to make it our master? Reporter Bots and Rhetoric Today&amp;#039;s computers are not self-aware, so they cannot hold opinions. But could one write a software program that, like those avaricious HAL 9000s in The Onion story, can churn out on its own a persuasive essay on why humans should invest in artificial intelligence? The short answer, according to AI researchers, is no. The longer answer is &amp;quot;It depends.&amp;quot; There are already software programs that can author articles, analyses, and reports. Wordsmith, for example, is a natural language platform developed by Durham-based Automated Insights. Wordsmith &amp;quot;takes multiple data sets, mines them for patterns and trends, and produces human-sounding articles,&amp;quot; Adam Smith, the company&amp;#039;s VP of business development and marketing, tells PM. Automated Insights counts Yahoo! and the Associated Press among its clients. If you&amp;#039;re a business analyst, chances are you have read a business article written by Wordsmith. This is what it looks like:  Admittedly, this article is dry. But, Smith says, choosing different words or adjusting sentence structure, a computer&amp;#039;s voice can have a little more flow. Here&amp;#039;s an example of Wordsmith&amp;#039;s snarkier coverage\u2014an auto-generated article about someone&amp;#039;s Yahoo fantasy football league:   Now we&amp;#039;re getting somewhere. But Wordsmith is still a long way from forming a cohesive, persuasive argument, whether that&amp;#039;s about why human beings should make supercomputers nearly omnipotent or whether ketchup or mustard is the superior condiment. And that&amp;#039;s because the program does not actually read articles and understand their context. Instead, it analyzes data sets provided by the customer and then mines them for hidden trends, Smith says. Convince Me Sports scores, quarterly earnings, and the vicissitudes of a financial portfolio are easy enough to arrange into tables of numbers, says Yejin Choi, an expert in natural language processing at the University of Washington. Opinions, however, are bit more challenging to quantify. In addition, software programs have a hard time imitating the rhetoric of a serious op-ed writer. &amp;quot;One is the content challenge; the other is the style challenge,&amp;quot; she says. On the content side, many AI researchers are now looking into how a computer might recognize when an argument supports or opposes a particular position. Likewise, computer scientists have been working on qualitative reasoning or understanding the relationship between two variables (for example, &amp;quot;If I throw the ball harder, it will travel further&amp;quot;). Today&amp;#039;s top computer program could probably paste together a number of topically connected arguments into some sort of rhetorical pastiche. But it wouldn&amp;#039;t be very sophisticated. &amp;quot;It would be at the level of a 10th grader. You might even fool some people. But you wouldn&amp;#039;t fool anyone good,&amp;quot; says Benjamin Kuipers, a computer scientist and AI expert at the University of Michigan. The giveaway, Kuipers says, would be the second part of the problem: style. The words would be off, the meanings slightly imprecise. For that reason, today&amp;#039;s AI stands a better chance at passing itself off as human if it claims to be a non-native English speak. Indeed, headlines recently hailed the first program to pass the Turing Test by convincing enough of its carbon-based conversation partners that it was a human. But the Eugene Goostman program had it easy\u2014it claimed to be a 13-year-old boy from eastern Europe, so humans forgave its linguistic errors. And in one episode of Radiolab podcast, the hosts interview Robert Epstein, former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today, who recounts the time that he discovered that his online Russian love interest was, in fact, a software program. It took him months to make that crushing discovery. We&amp;#039;ll probably feel the same when our favorite partisan blogger is revealed to be a program\u2014or when we realize Machiavellian machines have tricked us into serving them. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a12990/skynet-watch-could-a-computer-persuade-you-to-serve-it-17023293/>