Looks like game’s on for second graders featured in an article I wrote last week in the Daily Post. We had the young students analyzing sentence structure in a tweet that’s been in the news.
This is the tweet the second graders were analyzing:
“Now Wallace is a third-rate lapdog for Fake News MSDNC (Concast),” wrote the author, who went on to tweet…“Doesn’t have what it takes! She was thrown off The View like a dog, Zero T.V. Personas.”
As the kids were pointing out poor punctuation, misspelled words and other errors, one of the students suggested fixing up the tweet, as a class project.
Well, according to an article in Business Insider, an artificial intelligence bot is being programmed “to understand Trump.” So, as it turns out, the second graders could be competing, in a way, with artificial intelligence, because America’s POTUS, himself, Donald J. Trump, was the mystery author of the rather incomprehensible tweet about Wallace, fake news, Concast, and so on.
Kids in second grade English class going head-to-head with a bot? Odds are the bot would be favored to win. But the bot actually crashed, at least once, as it was analyzing a Trump speech. One passage “was such a tangled mess of never-ending tangents and clauses” that the bot, apparently, had a meltdown.
Could second graders trying to decipher a Trump tweet be in the driver’s seat? After all, the bot’s artificial intelligence can tell, already, when POTUS is angry or when he’s lying… but there was that meltdown. So who knows, for sure, who would win… the bot or the students?
It’s telling, in a way, that a bot can focus on a president’s anger and lying, when a Commander in Chief’s words can shape opinion. Messing around with opinion is what presidents do. Some presidents are better at it than others.
When President Trump, very recently, was urging Americans to return to work — prematurely, some health experts would say – and when he was describing people braving the pandemic — too soon, perhaps — as warriors, you can bet a lot of people were taking that word ‘warriors’ to heart. And when the President was alleging that “some Democrats don’t want (the) economy to recover,” that “they’re doing it for politics,” as Politico reported, words like that, undoubtedly, were opinion-provoking.
You have to wonder, since an artificially-intelligent bot can determine when this POTUS is angry or lying, if it can measure other things, as well. Like cleverness. And, at these moments in time, cleverness with a hint of evil?
Harvey Radin is former senior vice president in charge of corporate communications and media relations, Bank of America Western Region. He makes his home in Redwood City, CA.