Cards Against Humanity asked Spencer Kelly to teach a computer to write mean, funny joke-cards for a new, AI-based expansion pack to the game; Kelly trained the popular GPT-2 generative language model (previously) on existing cards, and now the company is livestreaming a 16-hour competition between its AI and its human joke-writers, with a voting system to up/downvote the resulting jokes (at the end of the day, these votes will be "tallied up and thrown in the garbage"). You can choose to buy the resulting packs, and if the human team outsells the robots, it will receive a $5,000 bonus. If they fail, they will all be fired. Read the rest

Yesterday, the New York Times published my "op-ed from the future," an essay entitled "I Shouldn’t Have to Publish This in The New York Times," which tried to imagine what would happen to public discourse if the Big Tech platforms were forced to use algorithms to police their users' speech in order to fight extremism, trolling, copyright infringement, harassment, and so on. Read the rest