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lexish00's review against another edition
2.0
I liked the premise of the book, but Christian did not spend nearly enough time for me on chatbots, language generation technology, and AI as it is in the world today. I enjoyed the sections on those topics and chess, but honestly way too much of this book was random asides and tangents on things that were mildly relevant and poorly held together. This isn't to mention that the writing was just kind of bad, too. Was there an editor??
As a linguist and academically-minded person I was annoyed by a lot of Christian's broad generalizations. First of all, he has a lot of weird misunderstandings about linguistics and language use. Second of all he seems to think he came up with the field of pragmatics when in fact it is a totally legitimate field (he said something about how linguists haven't thought about issues like "non-words" such as "uhh/umm" in speech, but linguists totally have and write about it a lot). For me this ruined a lot of his other ruminations because I wondered "if he doesn't understand linguistics, does he really understand all these other topics?"
All that said, it was an engaging book. And I really did enjoy the parts about chatbots. That was my main reason for reading it, because I think the chatbot world is very interesting, but I think this particular story would be better suited to an hour-long podcast or a longform article than a book.
As a linguist and academically-minded person I was annoyed by a lot of Christian's broad generalizations. First of all, he has a lot of weird misunderstandings about linguistics and language use. Second of all he seems to think he came up with the field of pragmatics when in fact it is a totally legitimate field (he said something about how linguists haven't thought about issues like "non-words" such as "uhh/umm" in speech, but linguists totally have and write about it a lot). For me this ruined a lot of his other ruminations because I wondered "if he doesn't understand linguistics, does he really understand all these other topics?"
All that said, it was an engaging book. And I really did enjoy the parts about chatbots. That was my main reason for reading it, because I think the chatbot world is very interesting, but I think this particular story would be better suited to an hour-long podcast or a longform article than a book.
rkaufman13's review against another edition
3.0
Unfortunately pretty outdated now, but if that was the only issue I would have rated this higher, as the author does still make some interesting and relevant points about language generation. Sadly, this book is also pretty meandering--it could have been half as long if not even just a magazine article -- and the weirdest part? We never actually see the competition. As in, the entire premise of this book. I was truly shocked when I reached the end :(
asafae26's review against another edition
funny
informative
reflective
slow-paced
4.25
This was an overall enjoyable and informative read with plenty of moments of reflection. At some points it was a little repetitive or dry, but overall I would recommend this book. Sadly a little outdated now, although there is still plenty that remains relevant today.
ciyaturnip's review against another edition
challenging
funny
informative
reflective
slow-paced
4.25
frudzicz's review against another edition
3.0
It's too loose a trek;
Through disconnected ngrams.
Human. All too meh.
Through disconnected ngrams.
Human. All too meh.
bodagirl's review against another edition
If I had read this book when I initially added it to my TBR in 2011-ish I would have found it interesting, but AI and GenAI have evolved too much.
bumsonseats's review against another edition
3.0
In 2009, Brian Christian won the title of Most Human Human in the Tur ing Test (Lobner Prize), which is a test where humans must convince other humans (during a 5-minute screen conversation) that they are in fact human and not AI programme. The AI programme can win the Most Human Computer Award.
In this book he explores what makes humans human, and how we can change when faced with robots and clever machines. A good read.
In this book he explores what makes humans human, and how we can change when faced with robots and clever machines. A good read.