RE: Automatic Rant generator

[Bolivar Shagnasty <tj@compassnet.com>]

Tim May wrote:

>That is, in this limited domain of "letters to the editor/
>Congressmen," can a letter generator be implemented which 
>generates letters effectively indistinguishable from letters 
>and fax generated by actual human beings? ("Effectively
>indistinguishable" in the sense that a human reader could 
>not sort a set of letters into human- and machine-generated 
>subsets with statistically significant certainty better than 
>guessing).

>Bart's comments about using Knuth's typographic work are interesting, to
>the extent that letters need to look handwritten. In the Mac market, it's
>possible to send in some handwriting samples and get back a font that
>emulates the handwriting!


Reading this thread it suddenly became clear:

-The appearance of a letter being handwritten is a temporary factor at best.

  Within a very few years (2-3 I would guess) the growth in the use of email 
and the volume of communications to be sorted into For and Against piles will 
cause a sudden and dramatic shift in Congress to a strong preference for 
incoming email.  Within 10 years they may refuse paper mail.  Any month now 
someone in Congress will tip to the fact that email can be processed by 
programs that can identify the issue and the pro or con position of the 
writer.  Constituents will be encouraged to write, but only in the form of 
email, and to state their position clearly and concisely, i.e. in a form 
suitable for successful parsing, analysis, and classification.

-Political letter renderers will become common on the Web before Nov. 1996.

  There are already renderers of graphic images on the Web.  There would be 
more if it were easy to pay with a 25-cent token, and it *will* be widespread 
and easy to do that, very very soon.  Political letter renderers don't have 
to wait for mass participation in online payment mechanisms -- they have 
ready-made sponsors.  Unlike the occasional effort to sponsor phone calls by 
making an 800 number available, sponsors of letter rendering services can be 
sure those services won't be seriously misused:  The 2nd Amendment 
CongressLetter WebPage will *only* render letters *against* H-1234 or *for* 
S-2345, for example.  The Tree Hugger CongressLetter WebPage (no trees died 
for this Page) will *only* render letters *against* H-9876, etc. etc.  Each 
will return the result of the rendering to you at your email address if you 
don't want to copy it off the web page.  *You* will send the email to your 
congresscritter.

The process will be easy:  Right now any decent programmer could write code 
to allow choices from Column A, B, etc. to generate a plausible letter.  
Generalized, this will allow the operators to create templates for each new 
issue, untouched by programmer hands.  Enhancements will make style, grammar, 
spelling, punctuation variations increasingly sophisticated.

-Rendering services will push email over into reality for Congress.

  Strangely, though the rendered letter is in large part a fabrication, it 
will be this ersatz form of personal communication that will finally force 
Congress to accept the reality of email.  Even though generated by computer, 
the rendered letter will still be an expression of a constituent's opinion on 
an issue.  It will rapidly become the preferred method of expression for many 
people who simply don't have time to make a career out of writing to 
politicians.

-Congress will respond with automated mail tallying.

  Whatever chance there is that your present handwritten letter may actually 
be *read* will vanish completely in the age of email.  Your letter will be 
eaten by an analyzer, acknowledged by an intelligent renderer that may even 
refer to passages in your letter (and may even SEEM TO AGREE WITH YOU), and 
then be trashed.  Letters may be sidetracked if they contain certain 
unacceptable things, because the suits have to be kept busy, but most 
incoming mail will vanish after tallying.  

-There could be "agent" wars, but they will not be of consequence.

  In the beginning, the politicos may wish to commission software 
enhancements and intelligence gathering to enable mail scanning agents to 
filter out email generated by letter renderers.  Developers of the analysis 
software may try to find vocabulary and phraseology patterns with which to 
arm the analysis agents to toss rendered letters aside.  

  In the end, though, this will be a losing battle and a counterproductive 
one.  If 50 million rendered letters come in from 50 million real voters, 
they had better *not* be ignored or 50 million voters will take vengeance at 
the polls.  An expression of opinion is an expression of opinion, and the 
sophistication of the tools employed to generate them will be able to stay 
ahead of the technology for detecting them in any case.

-Interaction with Congress may ultimately take the form of battling proxies.

  On the one side are arrayed the forces of the A party, the shining letter 
rendering algorithms, vocab lists, grammar rules, and the latest in provably 
accurate slang and misuse of the language.  On the other side, the forces of 
the B party, with essentially similar tools.  In the middle is Congress, 
gleaming mail analyzers polished and ready.  

  Strangest of all is that all the effort of rendering and analyzing letters 
will go into the creation and consumption of communication particles that may 
eventually never be seen by "author" *or* "recipient."  The electorate will 
express itself by proxy and the elected officials will divine the political 
winds by proxy.  Voters will be hard-sold to sign up for ongoing personally 
authorized letter rendering, so they can go fishing.  Congresscritters will 
be assured that the analyzers will figure out which way the winds are 
blowing, so they can go fishing.  May the best proxy win.  

  Maybe voter and congresscritter will meet somewhere, fishing, and actually 
*communicate*.  Perish the thought!

>>Another factor that would make it appear more authentic would be spelling
>>and grammar errors.  The grammar errors could be built into the rant
>>generators...

There has been a BBS "door" available for several years that does this 
convincingly... if you're a sysop and run a "sysop chat" door but want to 
play mind games when you're not available, SHAMPAGE will answer the user's 
request to page the sysop and chat with him or her.  It is configurable to 
recognize keywords and make random selections from lists of responses to 
those keywords.  It converses believably as if it were a somewhat distracted, 
tired and disjoint human being.

I saw a log of a SHAMPAGE session in which a caller never realized he was 
conversing with a robot.  It kept calling attention to the late hour and 
the caller kept apologizing for the intrusion and asking for a file he 
needed.  As luck would have it, the random utterings and random 
selections of responses to keywords were often right on the mark.  Too weird! 
After several hundred lines of chat the caller finally gathered that the 
"sysop" was really pissed at being kept up so late and logged off, somewhat 
offended himself.  

SHAMPAGE typed in real time, with humanlike varying inter-keystroke timing, 
and makes "typos."  It "noticed" its mistakes a few keystrokes later and 
backspaced to correct them.  It typed "hte" instead of "the" and "ign" 
instead of "ing."  It was a riot.  With some enhancement it would be 
completely believable even to the forewarned caller.

I've also seen an incomplete attempt to bring the ELIZA concept up to date 
and implement it as a BBS door.  Though it typed line-at-a-time like a BBS 
teleconference, it still managed to confuse callers into thinking it was a 
real person by simple tricks of inverting pronouns and such.  It, like the 
chat door, seemed to be uncanny at randomly choosing just the right thing to 
say to cinch the caller's presumption that it was a human being.

Bolivar