The Easy Questions That Stump Computers

Surely a system smart enough to contribute to The New Yorker would have no trouble completing the sentence with the obvious word, fire. In another attempt, it suggested that dropping matches on logs in a fireplace would start an "irc channel full of people." Commonsense reasoning--the ability to make mundane inferences using basic knowledge about the world, like the fact that "matches" plus "logs" usually equals "fire"--has resisted AI researchers' efforts for decades. Marcus posted the exchanges to his Twitter account with his own added commentary: "LMAO," internet slang for a derisive chortle. Neural networks might be impressive linguistic mimics, but they clearly lack basic common sense.