4 ms·
You may laugh, but it seems scarily plausible to develop a machine algorithm that generates 12 articles, have a human go through to pick the 3 least-ridiculous
by serhei 9y ago
You may laugh, but it seems scarily plausible to develop a machine algorithm that generates 12 articles, have a human go through to pick the 3 least-ridiculous ones and do some light editing, and push it out to the news.
- jabretti 9y agoMotley Fool seems to be the leaders in this -- if you search google news for any stock you're interested in then you'll find that Motley Fool seems to be cranking out largely-boilerplate articles about it; sometimes they seem to have had some human intervention, other times they seem to be fully computer-generated.
- ghaff 9y agoRoutine financial news, sports... Anything that can be largely churned out in boilerplate fashion based on some standard facts. This has been done for a while now and it will only increase as long as there's a business model for quickly published, largely undifferentiated, rote stories. It's a low-cost, high-volume game.
- dredmorbius 9y agoI was seeing credible copy produced for financial reporting in the late 1990s. The underlying data are available, the vocabulary is distinctly limited, and the reporting was already highly pro-forma. Mad-libbing a few variants of language and selecting the best of the lot does work fairly well. That actually raises the underlying question: why publish narrative copy at all in cases such as this, rather than data tables or charts? News and journalism are curiously allergic to data or presenting it in a usable fashion -- I've seen tables essentially written out over several paragraphs that could have been expressed in a few grid squares.