[ExI] Can AI make sense of things?

[John Clark]

*You might be interested in the Postmodern Generator:*


*https://www.elsewhere.org/journal/pomo/
<https://www.elsewhere.org/journal/pomo/>*

*Each time you refresh the page it will give you another Postmodern essay
written by another mythical professor, and the AI needs less than a second
to crank this stuff out. *

*John K Clark *


On Mon, Jan 5, 2026 at 6:06 AM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> I'm currently reading "A Devil's Chaplain" by Richard Dawkins, and one of
> the essays sparked a thought: Maybe we can evaluate how intelligent an AI
> is, by giving it some 'post-modernist' text to analyse, and see if it can
> come to the intelligent conclusion or if it just spits out more
> 'post-modernism'?
>
> In fact, maybe first ask it to evaluate some text that clearly makes no
> sense. If it passes that test, then feed it text designed to confuse the
> reader into thinking it might make some sense, and see if it can see
> through that.
>
> I'd avoid any 'post-modernist' articles that have already been debunked,
> though, because that would be cheating. Or even any that are explicitly
> identified as 'post-modernism', as the AI needs to make its own mind up
> about how much sense it makes.
>
> I don't know if this has already been tried, but it would serve two
> purposes if it works (answer the question, and show 'post-modernism' for
> what it really is).
>
> Which suggests something else. Maybe AIs could be used to 'de-obfuscate'
> various writings, translating them into plain speech? This would be
> fantastic for things like the utterances of politicians, legal documents
> (lengthy End-User Agreements!), etc. Or in fact anything where the
> intention (or unintentional effect) is to confuse people or obfuscate
> things, like marketing, business-speak, etc.
> To me, that sounds like a 'killer application' of the technology.
>
> ---
> Ben
>
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