The Internet is a strange place. The promise of cyberspace in the 1990s was nothing short of humanity’s next greatest achievement. For the first time in history, anyone could talk to anyone else in a vast, electronic communion of enlightened thought, and reasoned discourse. The Internet was intended to be the modern Library of Alexandria. It was beautiful, and it was the future. The Internet was the greatest invention of all time.
Somewhere, someone realized people have the capacity to be idiots. Turns out nobody wants to learn anything when you can gawk at the latest floundering of your most hated celebrity. Nobody wants to have a conversation, because your confirmation bias is inherently flawed and mine is much better. Politics, religion, evolution, weed, guns, abortions, Bernie Sanders and Kim Kardashian. Video games.
A funny thing happened since then. People started to complain they were being pandered to. They started to blame media bias and clickbait. People started to discover that headlines were designed to get clicks. You’ve read Moneyball, and know how the use of statistics changed baseball, right? Buzzfeed has done the same thing with journalism, and it’s working for their one goal of getting you to click that link.
Now, finally, the Buzzfeed editors may be out of a job. [Lars Eidnes] programmed a computer to generate clickbait. It’s all done using recurrent neural networks gathering millions of headlines from the likes of Buzzfeed and the Gawker network. These headlines are processed, and once every twenty minutes a new story is posted on Click-O-Tron, the only news website you won’t believe. There’s even voting, like reddit, so you know the results are populist dross.
I propose an experiment. Check out the comments below. If the majority of the comments are not about how Markov chains would be better suited in this case, clickbait works. Prove me wrong.
Post of the year.
Markov chains.
I read the title and thought “What a lame ‘clickbate’ article title”, only to find out it is a very fitting title in this case. Damn, ive been Benchoffed again
I didn’t read how Lars did this, but couldn’t the neural net be set up as a dynamic Bayesian net, and thus be a hidden Markov model?
I’m not too impressed. The headlines seem like the same kind of computer generated nonsense we’ve been seeing for a while now.
I don’t know much about Markov chains but I’d bet they would be better than this.
Love the eyeball. Sure grabs mine.
I learn great new terms here: “clickbait”. Thanks!
Rabble rabble, only read the headline. WTF is this shit, Buzzfeed?
Well, from the article it’s more like “Buzzfeed soup” :-)
“A Tour Of The Future Of Hot Dogs In The United States”, makes about as much sense as anything else on the net.
The David Bowie thumbnail ties it together.
MY DEAR BRAIN HEADLINES ARE BETTER THEN ANY OTHER NEURAL NETWORK GENERATED HEADLINES
до свидания,
Markov
So, I did a Google search on the following tags:
“bernie sanders kim kardashian evolution politics”
Guess whose thread came up ninth in the search results, Brian.
Then I decided to post a reply on this thread.
What did it feel like when you lost all hope and your soul left your body?
If you include the quotes, this is the only result. My soul is still in tact, for now.
I don’t count Buzzfeed as clickbait. They have headlines that draw you in, but they actually deliver and usually give you some idea what you’re getting into.
You do know what ‘clickbait’ means, right?
Technically, yes, but I used to work for a company whose name is the opposite of Questions and they’re scheme and business model is phenomenally worse than Buzzfeed. For every “10 Best Something Something” article, you have to click 3 times to go through one picture. A Top 10 type slideshow requires 30 clicks to complete and they’ve built close to 25 different sites to slap this model onto. They have completely changed my definition of “clickbait” and given me a new high water mark for “douchebaggery”.
Yeah, they “deliver” shit that other websites have made, largely without attribution, but with copious additional ad revenue from their ad-infested website. It would be like if I sold you a really tasty pizza by buying one from Papa John’s for $10 and convincing you to buy it off me for $15 without ever telling you where I got it from.
And the pizza I finally received would be cold.
And all your friends inexplicably love it.
Okay
Where can I get this Xbox One surgery?
“First you gotta kill a few people”
Be right back…
There is just another cohort of infinite monkeys at work now, chained to their MARKOV keyboards they prefer over DVORAK. Their supervisor Jason Rexing gave them an additional DEER dictionary to be update.
Fakenews.com: “Neural network generates fake user comments, making trolls unemployed!”
This reminds me of http://joshmillard.com/garkov/ where the Garfield comics have the caption replaced with markov chain generated text. The results are sometimes hysterical.
I was just about to post this! Damn :D
hmmmph, another day gone, thank you so much.
no chains, no matter how you mark them off. this is a terrible thing. it’s only measuring the dilution level and shouldn’t be used to justify.
keep up the [necessarily inferior but residually appreciated] work.
Click bait obviously works because the headline of the story was far more interesting than the real content. For shame.
Well, I’m glad to hear clickbait is written by computers, I’d be worried for the sanity of humans who had to write it.
Now, can we create Bayesian filters or something for it like for spam?
IT WORKS !
But would certainly work better with Markov chains…
Clickbaits make me agressive. I was very pissed when I read the headline of this article ;)
Exactly, I thought like [Brian] went completely mainstream. I clicked nevertheless to figure out what is going on, and I laughed in the end :)
To be completely honest… I already started writing a flame post without reading the article because I was so pissed. Luckily I somehow managed to calm down and read the article before posting :p
I think the content here is actually substantially better than what markov chains could produce. A Markov chain could, at best, produce a mashup of previous clickbait headlines, not entirely new ones.
I will admit that the RNNs with LSTM do generate some good clickbait, but all the images on clickotron would have still been selected by a human (for now).
No, according to the article the site searches wikimedia using the title as a search string and picks the top result with a permissive license.
It is strange that Google for the most part returns the same image.
I take that back, they were generated by Google using the headline and taking the first image returned.
Not really; by the time you search for that headline, by far the best result is the very article you’re looking at.
Love this post!
Re reddit “There’s even voting, like reddit, so you know the results are populist dross.”
Had me in tears!
Reddit could be great but the most useful subreddits are completely dead where as you can find every kind of porn on there
Now if somebody makes an app that uses the reverse of this and filters out the headlines meant for click baint…
When I saw the headline (and opening couple of lines of text), I did wonder if they’d made the neural net to do that so you could filter out anything with a high ‘click-bait’ factor from sites/feeds/hackaday but alas we just have to rely on the crowd to carry pitchforks and see where the mob takes us.
By far my favorite part of the linked article: “Ilya Sutskever and Geoff Hinton trained a character level RNN on Wikipedia, and asked it to complete the phrase “The meaning of life is”. The RNN essentially answered “human reproduction”.”
And from the comments: “I fed megahal all of Lewis Carroll’s works from project Gutenberg, and after a little chat it suggested “What is the use of computers without pictures or conversation”.”
I love this thing. Even if we’re using human pattern recognition (and confirmation bias) to cherry-pick the best examples, it’s still a wonderful little program.
I do not understand this experiment.
Markov chains will kill Obama and promote Saint Snowden to presidency. Meanwhile, NSA is busy decrypting Putin’s grocery list written on a typewritter. Kim Kardashian oh yeah.
Latent semantic indexing in google works best.
“This guy thinks his cat was drunk for five years” That actually made me laugh out loud & wake my wife. Because I had a cat that did sometimes act like that. Other than that – mostly crap.
“U.S. And China Top Oil Companies To Hold Major Gas Crisis For North Korea” skirts the fine line between plausible headline and Onion material.
I would have definitely tried a Markov chain in this case. Previous click history is not relevant to choosing the “clickbait”, because current trends attract attention. A neural net is interesting but is it overkill in this case?
The headlines are a lot more coherent than anything I’ve seen from a markov model, so I’d have to say no, it’s not overkill.
Markov chains are a bit too simple. They’re a useful tool, and prove some interesting points, but they’re not meant to be implemented for anything complex. Anything past fooling post-modern journals of textual anuspection is a bit much for them.
‘neural network’ clickbait then eh, since this is just randomized stuff without any intelligence or processing at all.
Nicely done Brian, you tricked us.
In Soviet America, Russian (Markov) chains rule you :)
In Soviet Russia, Markov chains you!
“People started to discover that headlines were designed to get clicks” – funny you should bring this up.
Yeah, seriously. This post is twice as popular as any other post today. The experiment worked, and expect more in the future.
*Abridged American Pie lyrics here*
… the day, that HaD, died
The problem with your experiment isn’t that it worked, but that humans are smart enough to catch on to bull. Maybe you fool me once or twice, but eventually classic conditioning will tell me I’m being falsly lured into another poorly written article. Well, maybe. I keep landing on these around here.
I kid.
Seriously though, click bait only works a few times before people realize they aren’t getting the satisfaction they expected. Maybe you made your money for the day but you may eventually run out of customers.
“Brian Benchoff is butthurt and what happens next is completely believable”
I clicked it… I can’t unclick it.
Can’t help but feel that this was somehow directly targeted.
/narcissism
B.S.
“Turns out nobody wants to learn anything when you can gawk at the latest floundering of your most hated celebrity…”
I dunno about anyone else… but i learn metric shit tons of stuff everyday on the internet. And i share it with the people around me, so they learn by association. Today we learned to strap a 2 x 4 to your tire perpindicular across the outter circumference to get out of mud. I learn all sorts of stuff on Hackaday everyday… and I am no hacker… well, not in the broadest sense of the term. Who know what ill learn tommorow?
And THIS is inherently the problem. The goal posts for what constitutes learning have shifted.
As opposed to learning being a process which leads to a slow but inevitable move toward mastery(even if you don’t achieve mastery), it is redefined as the consumption of tidbits people find might be useful at some point.
One wrong permutation away from a defamation case.
The headline did not mean much to me….but I was wondering what the headline had to do with (the image of) Obama having more surgery and the xbox one…
New law in
var ip = ‘‘;
document.write(“Your IP address is” + ip);
forces you to register your pet as food!
On ‘Justin Bieber’s campaign gun laws’:
“This week’s YouTube training offers what appears to be a controversial opportunity for everyone to think, and tells all about their history.”
Oh, this is a gem: “the program does not have to learn to spell before it learns how to perform modern jpurnalism.” Like that is a requirement for humans …
Dissociated press on emacs was using markov chains right ?