My question is: is this a real person, and if not, how does the robot work?
I suppose the post could be simply a teenager who is totally stoned, but still somehow coherent enough to read the instructions to register at this site,before typing an incoherent reply.
But more likely, the post is from a bot of some sort. But it doesn’t appear to have any financial incentive–no advertizing, no links to anything. So why would somebody make a bot that : 1) doesn’t work very well, and 2) doesn’t earn money?
Some of the language could be a robot that samples texts and glues phrases together, but on the other hand,there is a certain amount of, not exactly logic, but “connectedness” within each paragraph.Is this the level of artificial intelligence these days?
So—my first question is : whodunnit?
But my second -and main-question is: (asssuming it’s a bot)–WHY?
Remember that we have members for whom English is a second (or third…) language. I don’t know if that’s what we’re looking at here – it’s late and I’m not going to stay up and do detective work – but that’s certainly a possibility.
As far as financial incentive, there are bots that will attempt to establish credibility over time by posting a few seemingly relevant posts spread out over a couple of days before creating the money post.
That said, I think the non-native speaker hypothesis is more believable. A bot determining that a thread is about legalizing marijuana and then creating an appropriate message would be pretty damned sophisticated.
The text is generated by a bot. It consists of sentences taken from a large corpus, cut up and randomly reassembled. There is no intelligence to it.
Some part of the process of creating the account and posting the text may have involved manual intervention, I don’t have enough information to say in this case.
As for why, that depends what you mean. Why is it randomized in this particular way? To try to defeat the spam filters commonly in use on forums. Why does it not contain an obvious link or purpose? To seem plausible enough to pass by an inattentive moderator. What are they trying to achieve? They’ll come back later and post advertising links, because their client paid for traffic and/or search engine rankings.
Oh, as for the apparent relevance to the thread: they’re using a corpus of text loosely related to some topic they’re advertising. And they’re seeking out forum threads that rank well for keywords related to that topic.
I know nothing of such things but know that you have expertise. Nevertheless, I’m surprised. Surely software smart enough to combine vaguely related phrases to each other could have been smart enough to avoid simple grammar errors. Consider “I worked at a club for 5 years and plenty to say.”
But perhaps, since the overall content of computer-generated text is doomed to appear low-intellect, the low-intellect grammar is deliberate: good grammar would have been incongruous.
There’s a user on Youtube with the same name, similarly clipped grammer, and at least one post on marijuana legalization. Granted I just skimmed, but so far as I can tell, they’ve had an account there for several years and yet haven’t tried to sell anything. So I vote not a bot.
On further study: I misinterpreted something initially. There are indeed spammers that operate in that manner, and that produce text similar to this, but I this might not be one of them.
Grammatical and spelling errors come from the source material, and from mashing sentence fragments together.
Okay,… we seem to have a debate going here: either it’s a bot, or it’s a guy who’s baked out of his gourd.
But maybe we’ve discovered something really profound, which scientists have been hoping to find for half a century:
Because, if nobody can tell the difference between man and machine, isn’t that the perfect solution to the Turing Test?
Or maybe we’ve uncovered a real-life conspiracy theory: the post at youtube which Simplico linked to could be from a bot–the same bot who just joined us.
(and to our new guest—if you are real, welcome to the SDope…But , please, try to write more coherently.
Or else share some of that stuff you’re smokin’ --it’s been a long,long time since I was a student in the Sixties )
Some of them also obviously derive from the use of thesaurus synonyms, presumably to prevent the text exactly matching the plagiarised source. This is why I also assumed this was a Bot.
Had it been Bot generated, the first sentence would have started life as:
"The observed negative response to marijuana is essentially highly ignorant of its real raison d’être.
After a quick run through a thesaurus, the Bot produces
“To view negative response to marijuana is basically all very uneducated of its real reason existing.”
I’ve seen similar passages in genuine Bot generated messages, and every time it’s quite clear that words have been changed to Thesaurus synonyms that aren’t actually synonymous in context. So the passage seems to have meaning, but takes a lot of effort to decipher.
We’re exploring a different Test: Can a sentient human imitate a text-generation bot? This one seems to have failed: grammar too bad, and text almost makes sense.
There’s a different method, peculiar to a prolific forum spambot, that produces content with more of a Horse_ebooks vibe. That’s the one I was thinking of.
chappachula, that’s not as unlikely as you might think - there are spammers who create fake identities, complete with profiles and bios on social sites. Expensive. And not the case here.
Spammers make an effort to impersonate real humans. And sometimes humans are remarkably good at looking like spambots.
It would be easier for a human to generate text like that directly than it would be to create a bot capable of creating it. And spambots that seek to establish “credibility” usually go for more generality, statements like “This is a very interesting topic” that could fit into any thread.
And it’s fairly common with somebody speaking English as a second language. My favorite real-life example was a Mexican man who was browsing the displays where I worked years ago. When I asked, “May I help you?” he replied, “I am seeing only.” It was clear that he meant, "I’m just looking’, but didn’t understand English well enough to catch the difference in meaning between “looking” and “seeing”.
