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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday December 11 2019, @11:45AM   Printer-friendly
from the skynet-plays-CAH dept.

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1337

[Ed. The event is done by now but you can still watch it on YouTube.]

Cards Against Humanity writers are battling an AI to keep their jobs, and you can watch

The creators of Cards Against Humanity are back for their annual Black Friday stunt, and this one is delightfully dystopian. Starting at 11AM ET today and lasting for the next 16 hours, the human writers on the CAH team are facing off against an artificial intelligence to see who can create the most popular new pack of cards, based on how many people pay for more $5 packs. You can upvote or downvote your favorite cards for each side on CAH's website before buying, and you can also watch the humans struggle to come up with new iterations in real time over live stream.

On the line are $5,000 bonuses for every employee if team human comes up victorious, or heartless termination in the event the AI takes the top spot. We don't think CAH actually plans to fire their writers if they lose, but it is a clever stunt nonetheless to drum up the human vs. machine narrative at a time when automation may pose a very real threat to millions of jobs in the coming decade, writing included.

For Black Friday, we taught a computer how to write Cards Against Humanity cards. Now we put it to the test. Over the next 16 hours, our writers will battle this powerful card-writing algorithm to see who can write the most popular new pack of cards. https://t.co/BOZ5cuuEJk

— CardsAgainstHumanity (@CAH) November 29, 2019

It follows the company's tradition of pulling Nathan For You-style capitalism parodies on the most commercial day of the American calendar year. Last year, CAH held a 99 percent off sale on a series of outlandish items like a 17th-century halberd and a 2015 Ford Fiesta with just 25,000 miles on it. (The company reportedly did ship some of the items in the sale, at least those that were sourced from its own office.) In 2013, the company raised the price of its card packs by 100 percent, just because it could.

"Black Friday probably represents the worst things about our culture," Cards Against Humanity co-creator Max Temkin said in a statement last year. "It's this really repulsive consumerist frenzy right after a day about being thankful for what you have. So it's always seemed like a really good subject for parody to us."

This year, CAH is both live streaming the human writers room and updating a live list of the most popular AI-generated and human-written cards that will make it into the eventual physical card packs, which will be shipped out next month. (You can buy both if you so choose.) Some of my AI favorites include "Some sort of giant son of a bitch who lives in the internet" and "Sitting in the back of the plane, smoking a cigar and reading the Flickr privacy policy," the latter of which settles the age-old debate of whether a malevolent AI bent on destroying humanity is for or against the Oxford comma.


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  • (Score: 2) by fadrian on Wednesday December 11 2019, @02:23PM (2 children)

    by fadrian (3194) on Wednesday December 11 2019, @02:23PM (#931045) Homepage

    They should add a third team - one that edits the output of the AI. My guess is that this team would do the best in terms of both quantity and quality. It's also what the future of work will most likely look like, rather than a human-only or machine-only work environment. Of course, this still means many fewer human jobs, as the bulk of human labor will still be done via automation.

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  • (Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Thursday December 12 2019, @01:10PM (1 child)

    by shrewdsheep (5215) on Thursday December 12 2019, @01:10PM (#931372)

    Another data point: In chess, there used to be an "open" chess competition. You could play yourself, use an engine alone, or play with the help of an engine. The combined strategy was the best for a long time. However, these times are gone, a human can only worsen the performance of a chess engine these days.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 13 2019, @12:24AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 13 2019, @12:24AM (#931576)

      But humans are still needed to continuously optimise the chess engines.