On the other hand, I can think of at least two prominent elected officials (one at my state's level and one at the national level) who no longer speak in sentences that I can parse with my own mental model of English. The one from my state released a statement yesterday that seemed identical to the kind of thing one would get from a late '90s IRC chatbot that was trained on a big dataset of energy company press releases.
I was trying to keep this as a discussion about the technology and not about the politicians involved, but it apparently didn't stop most of the thread from ending up dead anyway, so the statement I had in mind (you can find more on the source if you're interested) was:
> "Our electric grid system is not stable. If it can be down or you have rolling brown outs or black outs and we know that is possible. If you don't have base load that means something, some type of energy that will run 24/7, rain, shine, no matter what happens is uninterruptible. The only two things you have that does that on a uninterruptible basis is coal and nuclear"
This isn't the first time I've wondered at the applications of natural-language processing software in political [speech]writing. I'm not sure where best forum is for people to discuss these ideas, but I apologize if this was too political, regardless, for this site.
I think some context would be helpful to parse the specific things he's referencing, but, here's my partial translation/paraphrase:
"I'm smart. My uncle was smart too. I went to Wharton, he went to MIT. He was a nuclear scientist. You know, I feel like people don't give he and I the credit we deserve. We have good credentials but people don't pay attention to that. They think I'm stupid because I'm Republican. But if I ran as a Democrat, they'd think I'm smart.
Anyway, my smart uncle told me that nuclear energy is really powerful and efficient. And that was 35 years ago, so I imagine it is even more powerful and efficient now.
Now I'm going to tell you about three or four prisoners. Some are male and some are female, I think. The female ones are smarter.
But anyway, the Persians/Iranians are great negotiators. The US should have negotiated harder with the Iranians. But I feel the Iranians ended up getting a good deal regarding our nuclear negotiations. And I feel that the United States' economic and security interests have been harmed by the deal we made with the Iranians, who are smart."
It's easier than that. "My uncle and I are both smart and understand the power of nuclear. The media deny how smart I am because I'm a conservative. I wasn't there when we negotiated the Iran deal- someone weaker was, who by the way didn't recognize the intelligence of females, and that resulted in additional American prisoners and the US getting a bad deal.
It's fascinating how big a quotient the persuasiveness of his speech lies on the vocal level, and is almost nonexistent when written out, abstracting away that detail. It almost makes me think that the current level of chatbots are enough, if only they could nail the text-to-speech component; to really surf whatever it is that makes speech sound powerful and influencial.
The thing is, that's a very hard problem. He's probably got either the luck to be in a favorable space or some sort of native intuition that makes his speeches resonate with a certain group of people.
It's basically something very fuzzy, historically the hardest thing to emulate with computers :)
Fuzzy would imply it's hard or impossible to model it, mathematically. But ask any good biologist and I bet you'll hear quite a bit of confidence that the keys behind powerful speech can be understood. For an engineer without domain expertize, yes it's fuzzy. Armed with the right research papers? Highly likely something persuasive could be implemented.
I'm pretty right leaning and I honestly think the funniest thing is listening to him talk, I never have any idea what he's talking about no matter how long I listen to his speeches. Ideologically he and I agree on some things, but I just never know because I can't understand a single thing he says unless he tweets it. I think he actually suffered when twitter upped the char allowance bec the brevity forced him to be succinct.
What was he trying to accomplish with that speech? Educate a classroom of college students? That's what lecturers are for. What was he trying to accomplish? He was trying to win a political race. He succeeded. It's annoying when people act like Trump is an idiot. (Or GWB before him. It was EXACTLY the same pattern.) Hate him a little or hate him a lot, he wouldn't have become president if he were an idiot. One could strongly argue part of his success is due to people underestimating him so much.
