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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 ikanreed on Wednesday December 11 2019, @06:20PM (3 children)

    by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday December 11 2019, @06:20PM (#931156) Journal

    To be fair, cards against humanity is a painfully easy thing to write.

    Write a base joke that relies entirely on irreverence for humor(i.e. any dead baby joke), put the setup on the black card, put the punchline on the white card, repeat 60 times, ship it.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 11 2019, @07:52PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 11 2019, @07:52PM (#931200)

    Drat, beat me to it.

    I'd mark you as +1 insightful, but I'm just an AC, so I can only reply to show my agreement.

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by FatPhil on Wednesday December 11 2019, @11:13PM (1 child)

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Wednesday December 11 2019, @11:13PM (#931256) Homepage
    Wrong. Unfortunately.

    You're thinking of /Cards Against Humanity/, the card game invented by 8 young white males. OK, at least one jew in that team, which is why they managed to defend themselves from criticism after including the possibilities for combos like "What gives you intollerable gas?" "Nazis".

    That's long dead and buried.

    what's in its place is a thing called /Cards Against Humanity/, but that's where the similarity ends. Dead baby jokes, gone. Trannies jokes, gone. Nazi jokes, gone. Gay jokes, gone. Anything that could possibly offend special snowflakes, gone.

    Wanna know how that happened - watch the first minute (or all 11 hours, the people don't change) of the vid (it's not corrupt, there's no sound). Notice that *none* of the original contributors are in the team any more. And they're much more diverse now - they now don't have any white males *at all* - maximal diversity achieved.

    And yes, nowadays the killer jokes are things like "What really exacerbates your period pains?" "White privelege". Hahaha, right on, sister, say it like it is!

    (I don't wish this upon anyone, namely watching more than a negligible amount of the vid, but I'm looking forward to someone "correcting" this post, for reasons only those who've seen a particular screenshot will understand.)
    --
    Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
    • (Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday December 12 2019, @03:21AM

      by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Thursday December 12 2019, @03:21AM (#931305) Journal

      I don't think the particular kind of shitty joke you're recreating with the gameplay is of much interest to the problem of it being a very boring way to write.