Ask HN: Is InspiroBot a real AI?

I'm also interested in this question, chiefly because the quotes do not seem purely "random", as some media are describing them - even in the sense of syntactically correct but random - and because there doesn't appear to be readily available information from the creators.

I'm fairly certain it isn't. It's phrases are repeated, certain nouns or other parts of speech are used way more than I would imagine a neural network would be limited to.

I think this may be the latest in a long tradition of fake AI, dating back to the original Mechanical Turk (chess-playing automaton with a man inside).

There are a few recognizable madlibs-like patterns. For example: "Unleashing bad karma is a joke where the punchline is that you get very, very sick", and "Realizing the full potential of hell is a joke where the punchline is that you fake your own death". Occasionally the photos repeat as well.

But if they're all written using a fill-in-the-blanks format, there must be an enormous number of templates. Maybe they analyze thousands of famous quotes and randomly replace various parts of speech.

While InspiroBot may be AI-assisted, I suspect the quotes are largely human-written, or at least heavily curated. Maybe this is my anthropocentrism speaking, but most of them seem too good to be AI-written. They don't have that meandering pointlessness of most AI poetry.

For example, "The things we find beautiful are actually just thoughts circling a fire." Or, "Could it be that eternal particles are eternal particles because you're overthinking things?"

Or my favorite: "Science is just mother nature playing with herself."

(My modest contribution to the fake AI genre was a song-creation program called "Turd Polisher Pro", released on April Fool's Day, 2010. The web page included "before" and "after" sound files that demonstrated how the program can automatically turn a drunken voicemail message into a polished, commercial piece of music. Of course, the song was written first; the drunken voicemail recording reused some of the same phrases and themes.)