Natural Language Processing Used to Serve Up Cynicism

May 20, 2014

One tech-savvy skeptic channels his frustration with Age-of-Aquarius bromides into what he calls his “New Age [BS] Generator.” With a mouse click, the application assembles random esoteric phrases into sentences that do sound remarkably like something one might see from modern mystics. Blogger seb pearce explains he was inspired while watching Deepak Chopra debate philosophy:

“After sitting through hours of New Age rhetoric, I decided to have a crack at writing code to generate it automatically and speed things up a bit. I cobbled together a list of New Age buzzwords and cliché sentence patterns and this is the result.

“You’ll get some profound-sounding nonsense here, too.

“So, what is this for? Put it on your website as placeholder text. Print it out as a speech for your yoga class and see if anyone can guess a computer wrote it. Use it to write the hottest new bestseller in the self-help section, or give false hope to depressed friends and family members.”

Pearce admits that he was not the first to put forth such a generator. While he was working on his mockery, another page called “The Enigmatic Wisdom of Deepak Chopra” was launched; he encourages us to try both generators. The popular sites indicate that pearce is not the only one tired of philosophical clichés.

Cynthia Murrell, May 20, 2014

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Natural language processing, News

Comments

3 Responses to “Natural Language Processing Used to Serve Up Cynicism”

Prefect for your next marketing-ware page – The New Age BS Generator | Dot Net RSS on May 20th, 2014 7:33 pm

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.