Joe Procopio is a serial entrepreneur and is the founder of ExitEvent. He is also currently the VP of Product Engineering for VC-backed startup Automated Insights. Joe writes about new and shiny things at TechJournal, News & Observer, WRAL TechWire, and other bylines, all of which can be found here. You can hit him on Google+
The Turing Test, as defined by British mathematician Alan Turing in 1950, portends that if a computer can fool enough humans into thinking that it itself is human, it can be considered to have the same level of intelligence as a human.
Then, as the dystopian among us would have you believe, they take over.
I had four thoughts on the subject:
1) Bullshit. That's just a chatbot.
As soon as the claim was made, it was challenged. Experts called into question everything from the low number of judges it convinced (10 out of 30) to the fact that the test was undertaken with stipulations on what kind of human this was supposed to be -- specifically, a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy who spoke English as a second language.
I mean, come on, then do the test in Ukrainian.
But the most obvious detraction is that Eugene is just a chatbot.
Human conversation is not a tennis match. It has stops and starts, it has people talking over one another, it builds on the ideas from the other participant. This chatbot, like all chatbots before it, immediately fell into a generation-old chatbot routine: --Read On
A very odd thing happened at the ExitEvent Startup Social this past Monday night at Boylan Bridge Brewpub in downtown Raleigh.
As usual, we had a great turnout, over 100 entrepreneurs and investors came out for the amazing view of Raleigh's ever-changing skyline, a night out on the deck with perfect weather, great beer (their Scottish is fantastic), and a lot of new faces.
Blah blah blah.
But this time out, a disproportionate amount of these new faces were investors. Sure, we had quite a few regulars -- for example, it was awesome to see SouthCap/BullCity's Jason Caplain back after a couple months hiatus -- but several new Angels and VCs introduced themselves to me that night. I knew their names and their firms, but this was the first time I had met a few of them face to face.
That's always a cool thing, but not a very odd thing.
The very odd thing was that two of the new Angels, one each at two different times, interrupted the cordial conversation to let me know that they were actively looking for new investments, and anyone I could recommend would get a good look.
My reaction was as follows: 1) I've never gotten this request from Angels before and 2) I just got two.
So on one hand, I was intrigued that there was this new hunger for deal flow at the Angel level. But at the same time, it underscored the fact that seed stage investors are having a tougher and tougher time finding the right deal flow.
And I can't decide if that's a good thing (demand) or a bad thing (supply). --Read On
100 million stories, each one unique and professionally written, covering everything from news to finance to sports to marketing and beyond. In fact, by the time 2014 is over, Ai will have produced over 1 billion automated articles. And what I plan to tell the gathered Columbia students and assorted journalism professionals at said conference is that we're not going to put any journalists out of work.
Well, any decent journalists, anyway.
I feel pretty good about that bold statement, basically because it's one I've backed up continually over the last four years, although the need to defend our intentions, so to speak, has lessened recently. People are starting to get it now, the fact that automated content works best in situations where live human journalists either can't produce the content, as in the case of the millions of fantasy football recaps we produce every Tuesday morning, or don't want to, as in the compiling of mountains of big data into an easily digestible narrative.
When you consider that, automated content is actually another tool for the hardworking journalist, not competition.
If anything, those who consider themselves data visualists -- the Excel wranglers and infographic ninjas and Powerpoint enthusiasts of the world -- those are the people who should be worried about automated content.
Oh, and you listicle folks, we're definitely coming for you. With prejudice. --Read On
So the Internet collectively lost its mind last week on the story that machines had finally caught up to us cagey humans, and that a "supercomputer" called Eugene Goostman effectively passed the age-old Turing Test.
A very odd thing happened at the ExitEvent Startup Social this past Monday night at Boylan Bridge Brewpub in downtown Raleigh. 
On Friday, May 30th, I'll be speaking at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University at the Quantifying Journalism: Metrics, Data and Computation Conference. I'll be talking about the Robot Reporter trend, based on the four years of work I've done creating over 100 million automated stories via Automated Insights.