Man Vs Machine: who is the winner?
Is artificial intelligence so advanced? I challenge you to guess if something is written by a human or an AI writer
The challenge
Artificial intelligence is nowadays a pervasive aspect of our everyday lives, even if we no longer notice it. The progress in this field has grown so much in the last few years that almost every device or digital service exploits the technological results of this discipline.
I don’t want to dwell too much on artificial intelligence’s definition and its applications (why will be clearer later), but rather, I have a question for you:
Are you able to distinguish an AI from a human-made artefact?
Now, I’m going to explain more in detail what I mean.
Among the millions of artificial intelligence tools and applications, let’s focus on AI writing software. Usually, this type of tool is mostly used to assist writers, but it can be used to produce a text entirely written by a machine, without human intervention.
So, this is a sort of simplified Turing Test, where I challenge you to guess who is the human and who is the machine only by reading a text.
Set up the challenge
Below, I will figure out how I designed this challenge and which tools I used.
The topic
Of course, the topic of the text artefact is the first thing to decide. After some thought, an exciting idea emerged from my mind: an artificial intelligence speaking about artificial intelligence itself as a sort of autopoietic phenomenon. Why not?
The choosen topic is “Artificial Intelligence”… let’s continue!
Content length
The text’s length has to be a compromise because too short text might be very hard to distinguish, while too long content is not compatible with the average patience of a reader.
I think 250 words is a good compromise
The machine
When I started searching for AI writers, I was surprised at how many solutions exist. So, I needed some criteria to restrict my search. First of all, I need the content creation feature (so I excluded all tools that are exclusively writer’s assistants). Then, I didn’t want to pay for a tool to use once, so I filtered out all free solutions or those with a free trial.
The choice fell on Jenny
Jenny is an interesting tool able to generate content autonomously, with a free trial possibility limited to 500 words of generated text (which is more than enough for my purpose). So I configured the tool as shown below, with:
- Type: Blog
- Topic description: “Write a blog about artificial intelligence application in real life”
- Style: friendly
Then, Jenny started writing a sentence that I accepted. After the first sentence, I accepted almost all the other subsequent sentences until reaching 250 words.
Fun fact: in the end, to my big surprise, the generated text was impossible to copy, and so I had to do a trick to copy the text that I won’t reveal here :-)
The human
For the human part, I needed an article written by someone on artificial intelligence. The obvious way to find an article is by doing a Google search
So, on September 21, 2022, I googled the same sentence used for the topic description of the AI writer: “artificial intelligence application in real life”. Then, I reached page 3 (I must confess that it was the first time I visited the third page of Google results).
I chose the result highlighted in red in the figure
Then, I took an excerpt of about 250 words from the article (now that you know the article I picked, please don’t cheat by reading it before your guess).
It’s time to guess
To make your choice clearer, I introduced two fictional authors: Olivia and Ed. Now, I ask you to read the following contents and try to guess who is human and who is the machine.
“Artificial intelligence is a term that refers to the ability of machines to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages. AI is already being used in many different fields, including healthcare, finance, manufacturing and marketing. It can be used for a variety of applications, including fraud detection, sales forecasting, inventory optimization, customer sentiment analysis, and spam detection. Machine learning can help companies to improve processes, products, and services by detecting patterns and suggesting improvements. For example, machine learning may help a company to identify inefficiencies in their supply chain so that they can take steps to reduce costs and improve efficiency. Or it may recommend improvements to a company’s advertising strategy to increase their conversion rate. Facebook uses machine learning to help customers find relevant content and friends. The company has also started using machine learning to help identify hate speech in online posts. This allows them to respond quickly and remove offensive content before they negatively affect their users. Netflix also uses machine learning to recommend movies to its customers based on their viewing history and ratings provided by other users. Google uses machine learning to structure its results, for its search engine and for YouTube’s recommendation system. It also uses machine learning to help self-driving cars to navigate unfamiliar roads. Amazon.com uses machine learning to help customers make product recommendations and to suggest products based on a customer’s previous purchases.”
“Artificial intelligence is the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines, especially computer systems. Specific applications of AI include expert systems, natural language processing, speech recognition and machine vision. AI is important because it can give enterprises insights into their operations that they may not have been aware of previously and because, in some cases, AI can perform tasks better than humans. Particularly when it comes to repetitive, detail-oriented tasks like analyzing large numbers of legal documents to ensure relevant fields are filled in properly, AI tools often complete jobs quickly and with relatively few errors. This has helped fuel an explosion in efficiency and opened the door to entirely new business opportunities for some larger enterprises. Prior to the current wave of AI, it would have been hard to imagine using computer software to connect riders to taxis, but today Uber has become one of the largest companies in the world by doing just that. It utilizes sophisticated machine learning algorithms to predict when people are likely to need rides in certain areas, which helps proactively get drivers on the road before they’re needed. As another example, Google has become one of the largest players for a range of online services by using machine learning to understand how people use their services and then improving them. In 2017, the company’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, pronounced that Google would operate as an “AI first” company. Today’s largest and most successful enterprises have used AI to improve their operations and gain advantage on their competitors.”
So, who is the artificial intelligence?
Check your guess
It’s time to reveal the truth.
Drumroll…
Drumroll…
Drumroll…
Olivia is the artificial intelligence, while Ed is the human, and his article is available at: https://www.techtarget.com/searchenterpriseai/definition/AI-Artificial-Intelligence
Fun fact: as you can see on TechTarget, Ed’s photo is real and his name is really Ed, while Olivia’s photo is a random Artificial Intelligence generated image obtained on https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/.
Conclusion
In my opinion, AI technology has improved significantly in the last few years. What do you think about it? Maybe in the next future, we will not be able to tell if something is written by a human or an AI.
Maybe this article was written by an AI too?
Anyway, I’m very curious to know your guess and the motivations behind it. Tell me in the comments what your choice was and why you made it.
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