Michael S. Bernstein, Greg Little, Robert C. Miller, Björn Hartmann, Mark S. Ackerman, David R. Karger, David Crowell, and Katrina Panovich. 2015. Soylent: a word processor with a crowd inside. Commun. ACM 58, 8 (July 2015), 85-94. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/2791285
“Next week’s reading is on Soylent”, I tell my roommate, who often consumes Soylent as one of his ‘grad meals’. “Guess who else has a Soylent when he misses breakfast? – My advisor, Dr. Sang Won Lee!” I tell him.
“Ooh! Let me know about the article once you’ve read it then!” My roommate says, now invested.
I was disappointed to read this paper and find that it is not about the beverage.
Bernstein et al, have christened their crowdsourced word processor, ‘Soylent’. Their work has three parts, namely – shortn, crowdproof, and the human macro. Shortn is shorthand for summarization of text articles (80-90% of their original size) using the labor of crowd workers. Crowdproof is crowd-aided autocorrect/spellcheck with an accuracy of 67%. Human macro denotes the custom requests made to their crowd, sourced from Amazon Mechanical Turk. Soylent uses Fix-Find-Verify to edit a given document to perfection. Find identifies the phrases that need fixing, followed by the fix to correct them, followed by verification to determine whether the correction is valid.
An issue the authors mention for systems like soylent is the matter of legal ownership. This made me zone out to ‘Authorship in Art’ article by Aaron Hertzmann on if a computer can ever be an artist. That is an entirely different ballgame, but in this case I believe, that the authorship still belongs to the actual authors who did the creation of the document/manuscript. I might acknowledge the VT Writing Center in my research paper, but not make them a co-author for sure.
Since then, a worthy feature of just AI capability in augmenting and suggesting text that I find worth mentioning is the autosuggest feature showing up in Google’s Productivity Suite.
This is insane how they are able to read my draft and suggest a subject line for me!