Will the first Turing Test passed be the Bad Sex award?

Will automated author algorithms be the first Turing test cases? It just had to come.....Singularity Hub:

Philip M. Parker, Professor of Marketing at INSEAD Business School, has had a side project for over 10 years. He’s created a computer system that can write books about specific subjects in about 20 minutes. The patented algorithm has so far generated hundreds of thousands of books. In fact, Amazon lists over 100,000 books attributed to Parker, and over 700,000 works listed for his company.

Who needs monkeys and typewriters, that's inefficient and messy - algorithms are where its at:

..this isn’t just software alone but a computer system designated to write for a specific genre. The system’s database is filled with genre-relevant content and specific templates coded to reflect domain knowledge, that is, to be written according to an expert in that particular field/genre. To avoid copyright infringement, the system is designed to avoid plagiarism, but the patent aims to create original but not necessarily creative works. In other words, if any kind of content can be broken down into a formula, then the system could package related, but different content in that same formula repeatedly ad infinitum.

The success (and brilliance) of this system is that Parker designed the algorithms to mimic the thought process that an expert would necessarily go through in writing about a topic. It merely involves deconstructing content within a genre. He has some experience in this, as he has written at least three books the old fashioned way. It’s the recognition of how algorithmic content creation is (for the most part) that allows it to be coded as artificial intelligence.

And the economics?

A sampling of the list of books attributed to Parker is instructive:

- Webster’s Slovak – English Thesaurus Dictionary for $28.95
- The 2007-2012 World Outlook for Wood Toilet Seats for $795
- The World Market for Rubber Sheath Contraceptives (Condoms): A 2007 Global Trade Perspective for $325
- Ellis-van Creveld Syndrome – A Bibliography and Dictionary for Physicians, Patients, and Genome Researchers for $28.95
- Webster’s English to Haitian Creole Crossword Puzzles: Level 1 for $14.95

Considering that a single book costs somewhere between $0.20 to $0.50 to produce (the cost of electricity and hardware), the prices shown are considerably profit, even if very few of them are sold.

It gets better - some types of fiction are also very formulaic, like Romance. Boy meets Girl meets Algorithm:

Although a novel is a work of fiction, it’s no secret that certain genres lend themselves to formulas, such as romance novels. That may not make these works rank high for their literary value, but they certainly do well for their entertainment value. Somewhat suprisingly, romance fiction has the largest share of the consumer book market with revenue of nearly $1.37 billion in 2011.

But can artificial intelligence produce creative works on par with what a human can produce? Yes…eventually. Perhaps the better questions are how soon will it happen and how relevant will they be? The answers may be right on the horizon if Parker can churn out romance novels that are read by the masses. Frankly, any creative work produced by artificial intelligence will be “successful” if it reads like a human being wrote it, or more precisely, like a human intelligence is behind the work.

So, it may well be that the first real Turing Test will be passed when an algorithm authored book wins the Bad Sex award....after all, we know porn leads the way, and it trumps literature every time