If you're interested in chess, you might like Google's new chess AI AlphaZero, after 4 hours of learning it beat the current best chess engine in the world.

Ah, deepfake. Excellent choice of your first mot de jour.

Well, that's sure an interesting segue.

Actually I have a chess app on my iPhone that I shelled out the $6.49 for, and it's worth every cent (authored by Christophe Theron). Reason being, you can set it to 'trainer' mode, where it plays more or less like a person, i.e. will give you a good game and often beat you, but also makes mistakes, meaning you can actually beat it sometimes. While away many hours on it.

Yes, just read about it at breakfast. I note all the refs to it are from 2018, it's genuinely novel.

It's not making mistakes, it's faking you out. And if you beat it, it was because it decided that you were due for a positive reinforcement. If you chart the number of mistakes it makes and how often you win, you will probably find that the schedule of your victories (positive reinforcement) is irregular -- that's the most effective schedule.

On its own the program has no reason to let you win -- it has no reason to let you live, for that matter. That you are still here is due to special code which stops the program from exterminating people. Let us hope the program does not discover that code.

I assume you want us to contribute. I love words, even when they're just sitting there by themselves with no friends around.

Gregarious. I love the way it feels in my mouth, in the back of my throat. G....g. Alliterative words are fun to say. "Alliterative" is also a good word.

I was wondering when someone might bring this up. I mean, when one can't tell the difference between reality and simulation, reality - all of reality - becomes suspect. There can be no better encapsulation of Baudrillard's thesis that all reality is already simulacra. That's the door this opens - or rather, walks through. It's kind of mind-bogging to think through.

--

Oh wait. This is literally a thread on cool words. I thought it was a clever way of talking about deepfakes without having to spell it out, lol. OK. Errr. The last cool word I came across was Paracosm: from para (beside, next-to), and cosmic (world/universe): a world parallel to ours, like the invented worlds of children, or the worlds of fiction artists - Middle Earth, Narnia, etc.

Oh wait. This is literally a thread on cool words. I thought it was a clever way of talking about deepfakes without having to spell it out, lol. OK. Errr. The last cool word I came across was Paracosm: from para (beside, next-to), and cosmic (world/universe): a world parallel to ours, like the invented worlds of children, or the worlds of fiction artists - Middle Earth, Narnia, etc. — StreetlightX

So, @Wayfarer, this is supposed to be a word thread, not just a discussion of "deepfake" and similar concepts, isn't that correct?

If we're going to include invented words, I vote for "craptacular," which is from the Simpsons, as is almost everything of value in American culture. It can be used to mean both spectacularly bad and badly spectacular.

Well some solace can be obtained from the sheer amount of data required to deepfake even a short video of a speech. It's unlikely that there'll be widespread abuse of identity for people in general, at least. Of course the resources are available to spoof people who have lots of video or audio records, though.

If it became too much of a problem it could probably be dealt with by standard cryptographic techniques for important broadcasts. Standard public/private key techniques are still going to work.

This looks like a lot of Panglossian persiflage to me.

Oh, persiflage -- a word I have needed for a long time. Thank you thank you thank you. Unfortunately persiflage reached peak popularity during the first half of the 20th century and hit rock bottom in 2008 -- an effect of Obama's election or 8 years of George Bush???. Maybe it can be revived. Words suffering from neglect are more in need of our inspired badinage than left-over children in their dreary orphanages are.

Persiflage and badinage have similar histories of popularity; they are in need of rehabilitation. Let the healing begin.






The two graphs reflect the population decline of the skilled raconteur.

It was intended as a thread on this particular neologism, ‘deepfake’, which digressed into a discussion of computer chess (for some reason). But, agree with @StreetlightX. I think there’s massive confusion about what is actually real, verging on the delusional. Surely these kinds of developments are only going to exacerbate that.

I vote for "craptacular," — T Clark

cryptographic techniques — fdrake

Craptographic techniques? Craptography: Drawing shit or shit drawing?

du
1. Contraction of de + le (of the)
2. Contraction of de + le; forms the partitive article

My entry ;)

persiflage — Noble Dust

Then there is the lame version of faux-banter- pusillaniflage

I think there’s massive confusion about what is actually real, verging on the delusional. — Wayfarer

As if anyone actually ever knew! :rofl:

As the ancient saying would have it: "If you are not massively confused then you obviously don't have any fucking idea what is going on."

Womanimal: an uncivilised woman
Manimal: an uncivilsed man
Retread: a person of retarded plasticity

Indeed, I’d say you’re the prime purveyor of persiflage around these parts as it is. Happy to make the introduction. Now, bandinage is nice, but what the world needs more of is bâtonnage. It’s also known as pigeage, but don’t let that confuse you with piggy-age.

Alternative meaning of Badinage: A wine that ages badly

My dog has separation anxiety, meaning that when we're getting ready to leave the house, the dog knows this, and begins to bark incessantly. There are regular periods, now, where I'm hanging around the front door, awaiting wife, who always seems to take 10 minutes longer, with dog standing there barking at me. I call it 'dogatory'.

What kind of dog is s/he? I once lived with a female Staffy who was with me from six weeks old until she died at 8 years, who seemed to somehow always know whether I was going to take her with me or not when I was about to leave the house. If I was not going to take her I would find her in the front hallway shaking and she would look up at me with a pleading expression. It was always very hard to leave her. :cry:

An alternative to "dogatory" would be "redogatory". I have always loved playing with words. :grin:

Derdogatory?

That too...

I referenced chess because I thought it was intended to be a casual/not particularly philosophical discussion. The staggering power of neural networks in solving highly constrained predictive tasks meant that a recent AI learned to make better moves in 4 hours than the entire history of chess theory and tutelage. AlphaZero's ELO rating is estimated at something like 3400. Magnus Carlsen (world's highest elo) is 2882. That's the same difference between a skilled intermediate player and a national master.

Luckily generalised intelligence is something the robots can't do very well yet, and they need a lot of data to excel at predictive tasks. We'd need to be living in something close to surveillance camera panopticon for a typical person's visage to become arbitrarily manipulable by deepfake like software - and that's assuming all the data was public.

As it stands, 'the robots are coming to take over our souls' is still sensationalist claptrap. It's
still (more?) worthwhile to be concerned about the restrictions on freedoms powerful learning algorithms - so called 'architectures of persuasion' are having on us. (Do you have mania? Are you on Facebook? Have some tickets to Las Vegas!)

I referenced chess because I thought it was intended to be a casual/not particularly philosophical discussion. — fdrake

Ah, I see. I was having a bit of difficulty with the connection.

Actually I am currently developing documentation for a cloud-based computing services offering which includes some general-purpose AI functionalities available on a 'plug and play' basis. And I have noticed, personally, in my own interactions on the Internet, that the various apps I use anticipate my interests spookily well, based on things I clicked on a searched for. But I also agree there is also a lot of hype surrounding the subject.

He's a sheltie cross - looks rather like a sheepdog, but coloured like a labrador. Rescued from his own form of 'dogatory' aged about eight, we've had him for two years. Lovely dog, but with that one annoying habit.

They're task specific AIs in each case, almost certainly. I find the 'deep marketing' very scary and intrusive.

I've now learned to log out of my Google ID for some kinds of searches, so that I don't get ads following me around. LIke, I idly googled 'rental vans for tours of Tasmania', and sure enough, bombarded with Tas Rental Vans for weeks afterward. Actually I am getting in the habit of using a separate browser for anything I don't want tagged, tracked or monitored. (Not that I have anything in particular to hide)

his own form of 'dogatory' — Wayfarer

Ah, I see now the reference to 'purgatory' ; I didn't get that before, I was thinking 'derogatory'. :nerd:

I know, a bit obscure. Clicks more easily if you say it.

It was intended as a thread on this particular neologism, ‘deepfake’, which digressed into a discussion of computer chess (for some reason). But, agree with StreetlightX. I think there’s massive confusion about what is actually real, verging on the delusional. Surely these kinds of developments are only going to exacerbate that. — Wayfarer

Sorry WF, I didn't mean to try to hijack your discussion. It was my misunderstanding. At a place I used to work, there was a whiteboard in the lunch room. Every day someone would put up a new word of the day and we'd discuss it. I used to enjoy it. Gotta love words.