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Id be really interested in your technical approach to this. How did you implement this in a high level?

freehunter 8y ago
The core of it is a decision tree tied to a pretty in-depth database that either knows everything about the city or seeks to learn everything about the city. The system reads an event on the calendar that says "Van Halen is playing at American Brew Pub on February 12th at 7pm" and starts running running through the decision tree pulling information out of the database to fill in the blanks on the phrases it's picked. Then it strings them all together to write something that looks something like: >Do you have plans on Tuesday? Well now you do! Van Halen is playing at American Brewpub at 7pm! Van Halen is a local rock band that we love. They have been to our city before, but they played at Next Door Music Venue (link to the previous article for Van Halen at Next Door). This time they're playing at our favorite brewery, so you can watch the show while drinking Local IPA! Tickets are required, and you can purchase them here (link to tickets). We'll see you there! People love these articles but they're not super fun to write every day (sometimes twice a day for the two cities), it's just routine stuff.
- jon-wood 8y ago
  The concept seems pretty solid, but reading the output I feel like this is bordering on unethical. Maybe this is just a bad example, but it seems you’ve gone past programmatically giving people information, and into giving the impression you’re actually endorsing things. Unless you actually add metadata to the artist saying you love them, or rate the venue to indicate it’s good for live music, you’ve got no way of going beyond “Van Halen, a local rock band, are playing at American Brewpub at 7pm Thursday. You can drink local IPA while watching them, and buy tickets here.”
  - fdggdfsvscvsd 8y ago
    Maybe the AI also considers ratings of the band. Then it would be no more unethical than online shops displaying customer satisfaction ratings? In any case the AI could make several educated guesses on how good the band is. Quality of the venue would be another indicator.
  - freehunter 8y ago
    This is a very simplified example written by human hands just for this post (not machine written). The database is immense and has far more fields than you might imagine. It takes into account how many clicks content with Van Halen has had in the past and how many clicks content with American Brewpub has had etc to figure out how likely this article is to resonate with our audience, plus how many human-written articles have been published about these subjects and sentiment analysis to figure out if our articles were positive or neutral (we don't write negative articles, if we don't like a business/event we just don't talk about it), which impacts how the machine-generated article is phrased or even if it gets written at all. We have about 90 events on our calendar per city in any given month, and this AI writes about three or four articles per city per week even though it's running constantly. It's pretty selective and very rarely writes something that our two human writers wouldn't have mentioned otherwise. Our personal preferences and those of our audience are certainly taken into account.
    - jon-wood 8y ago
      That’s incredibly cool, and definitely covers my concerns there. Good work on giving it some restraint rather than going for sheer volume as well.

The core of it is a decision tree tied to a pretty in-depth database that either knows everything about the city or seeks to learn everything about the city. The system reads an event on the calendar that says "Van Halen is playing at American Brew Pub on February 12th at 7pm" and starts running running through the decision tree pulling information out of the database to fill in the blanks on the phrases it's picked. Then it strings them all together to write something that looks something like: >Do you have plans on Tuesday? Well now you do! Van Halen is playing at American Brewpub at 7pm! Van Halen is a local rock band that we love. They have been to our city before, but they played at Next Door Music Venue (link to the previous article for Van Halen at Next Door). This time they're playing at our favorite brewery, so you can watch the show while drinking Local IPA! Tickets are required, and you can purchase them here (link to tickets). We'll see you there! People love these articles but they're not super fun to write every day (sometimes twice a day for the two cities), it's just routine stuff.

jon-wood 8y ago
The concept seems pretty solid, but reading the output I feel like this is bordering on unethical. Maybe this is just a bad example, but it seems you’ve gone past programmatically giving people information, and into giving the impression you’re actually endorsing things. Unless you actually add metadata to the artist saying you love them, or rate the venue to indicate it’s good for live music, you’ve got no way of going beyond “Van Halen, a local rock band, are playing at American Brewpub at 7pm Thursday. You can drink local IPA while watching them, and buy tickets here.”
- fdggdfsvscvsd 8y ago
  Maybe the AI also considers ratings of the band. Then it would be no more unethical than online shops displaying customer satisfaction ratings? In any case the AI could make several educated guesses on how good the band is. Quality of the venue would be another indicator.
- freehunter 8y ago
  This is a very simplified example written by human hands just for this post (not machine written). The database is immense and has far more fields than you might imagine. It takes into account how many clicks content with Van Halen has had in the past and how many clicks content with American Brewpub has had etc to figure out how likely this article is to resonate with our audience, plus how many human-written articles have been published about these subjects and sentiment analysis to figure out if our articles were positive or neutral (we don't write negative articles, if we don't like a business/event we just don't talk about it), which impacts how the machine-generated article is phrased or even if it gets written at all. We have about 90 events on our calendar per city in any given month, and this AI writes about three or four articles per city per week even though it's running constantly. It's pretty selective and very rarely writes something that our two human writers wouldn't have mentioned otherwise. Our personal preferences and those of our audience are certainly taken into account.
  - jon-wood 8y ago
    That’s incredibly cool, and definitely covers my concerns there. Good work on giving it some restraint rather than going for sheer volume as well.