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Comment by symphom | Hacker News Reader

Amazing. And now one only needs a random article generator, which describes marriages, breakups, mishaps, accidents, and plain random appearances of these celebrities. Tada, random fake celebrity news, which is probably even better at wasting people's time than the real thing. This is going to happen really soon, because text generation is much easier than what the Nvidia guys did.

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Just came here to say that it's time to start a gossip magazine about completely imaginary people. You beat me to it.

However I disagree about text generation, which seems to me to require a perfect equivalent of human intelligence to be at least acceptable. (I'd call it AGI-complete, or maybe HI-complete).

Gossip about people you’ve never heard of or seen completely defeats the allure of gossip doesn’t it?

I think these people being "real" is a secondary concern. Most readers of gossip magazines only see the characters from them only in the same magazines, or TV. Soap opears about completely imaginary characters faced a lot of success. I don't see why algorithmically generated soap operas won't have a chance, especially when adorned with "photos".

Of course I meant it as a joke. But I think the problem- or at least the point of the joke- isn't much in the fact that you haven't seen these people before. The point is rather that "gossip" is a sparse amount of information about some reality you don't have direct access to, but that exists and is consistent. So with normal gossips, it makes sense for the brain to gather all this info and try to infer a picture of the person behind it. However, if there is no real person behind the gossip the entire exercise is perfectly illusory.

Repeat a lie enough and it becomes the truth; they just have to make those fake celebs appear in TV now and then to turn them into cash cows. I'm 100% sure in due time we'll see Elvis singing stuff that Elvis has never sung in his life; producing fake celebs would be not that different: much less initial profits but also much less royalties to pay.

No threat of lawyers, no recourse, no boring luls, no lack of luxery/perversion and punnishment patterns, which allows for envy to be disguised as moral outrage - synthetic gossip is better then the real thing.

We allready have revived and virtual stars on the stage.

The allure in this case is generating money through clickbait, so no.

Well, create a few templates like some online media currently use and let bots fill the info in. The content should not change much from event to event.

I think that celebrity gossip articles would be prove to be as ritualized and standardized as sports and stock market articles; places where algorithmic article generation has worked well. You'd probably only have to hire human writers to do longform features and interviews, and to create an underlying model to generate the activity of these fake celebrities that you would be reporting on.

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