11 ms·
Robot Journalist writes a better story than human sports reporter
- tokenadult 16y agoEarlier submission from another publication: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2457864 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2457864
- EwanToo 16y agoSorry missed that one, you're right yeah.
- jsherry 16y agoI still think that the number one threat to professional journalists is the low barrier to entry for people to get into journalism these days, not robots. That said, this is really interesting and will likely play a role in generating content from structured data (like baseball stats) at some point in the relatively near future.
- jawns 16y agoMy take, as a professional journalist: The number one threat to professional journalists is the fact that newspaper readership has shifted from print to online, but revenue has not. Until news companies figure out how to make as much money per online reader as they used to make per print reader, the journalism world is going to continue to be in trouble.
- chc 16y agoI've never really understood this. The cost of keeping our website up is not even a percent of what it costs to lay out, print and distribute one dead tree issue. We don't need as much money as we once did. It just looks like a reluctance to adjust to me.
- scott_s 16y agoAre you including the cost of people? That is, the cost of paying people to maintain the servers, develop the backend and design the frontend?
- anamax 16y ago> Are you including the cost of people? That is, the cost of paying people to maintain the servers, develop the backend and design the frontend? They're a lot cheaper than people involved in printing paper and distributing it.
- scott_s 16y agoCan we put numbers on this? Even ballpark numbers. Because I'm thinking that if you have one system admin, one frontend dev, and one backend dev, that will cost at least $200,000 a year. That assumes that the cost of each person is at least $66,666 a year - that is how much they cost, not how much they are paid. I think that's a very low number, both in terms of number of people and in how much they cost.
- chc 16y agoHere's a ballpark: http://ask.metafilter.com/73789/Cost-of-printing-national-newsapaper#1097623 http://ask.metafilter.com/73789/Cost-of-printing-national-ne... And that's just printing, not counting the physical paper design folk, who also cost money and who actually are needed to design each individual issue (as opposed to website developers, who I maintain are not needed constantly to update a site whose primary product is not software).
- chc 16y agoDeveloping the backend and designing the front-end are essentially fixed costs, which amount to little more than the cost of printing a couple of paper issues of a fairly small publication.
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- mthomas 16y agoThis is a single data point. Its best not to draw conclusions from it.
- mcantor 16y agoGod this stuff drives me insane. The "robot journalist" wrote a good article because the person who created it PROGRAMMED IT to write a good article! There were no skills inherent to the software that eclipsed the requirement of having a creative human involved in the process. Articles like this don't mean anything.
- jawns 16y agoActually, articles like this do mean something -- at least to the journalists that the software is already beginning to make fear for their jobs. As a full-time journalist who has also written some "robot reporter" code -- see "I wrote this article with one mouse click," http://coding.pressbin.com/60/I-wrote-this-article-with-one-mouse-click http://coding.pressbin.com/60/I-wrote-this-article-with-one-... -- I know first-hand that even though it takes a creative human to code the software, once the software is written, it's "set it and forget it" ... which means you no longer need to pay a journalist to write the article, which means bye-bye journalism jobs. (Of course, it also means hello-hello journalist-programmer jobs.)
- sin7 16y agoHow long before we have robot programmers?
- ugh 16y agoSo what's wrong with the article? I don't really understand with what you are disagreeing.
- EwanToo 16y agoI'm not sure why it doesn't mean anything, surely the simple point of the software being written is to automate the task? Software like this can be used to amplify the productivity and creativity of 50 individuals, or indeed to replace 50 individuals each typing out their own report with 1 individual producing 1 computer program to produce the 50 reports.
- william42 16y agoDo you know what «fire and forget» means?
- marcusbooster 16y agoOnly because of the horrid sports journalism in the US that reads like a police blotter. I follow some Euro-soccer and was amazed at the difference in quality and breadth of the writing.
- aasarava 16y agoNot sure about European sports reporting, but the problem I've found with both the US sports reporting and the Indian sports reporting that I've read is that journalists are allowed to -- perhaps even encouraged to -- use sports jargon without definition. If a tech reporter were to file a story containing undefined three-letter acronyms (CRM, ROI, etc.) and refer to Python without mentioned that it's a "programming language," his or her editor would mark it up and send it back (as she should).
- corin_ 16y agoThat would be the case if writing for a more general audience... but in a publication whose audience is, say, digital marketing executives, "ROI" would be perfectly fine. Of course, depending on the editorial guidelines that publication follows, it might not be allowed because they don't like acronyms, but not because it needed a definition. With sports writing, you can't expect definitions for common sports jargon. In F1 racing you have to assume that readers know what "pole position" is, in football (US: soccer) you assume readers understand "offside", and so on. If you were to explain every piece of sporting terminology in every article, it would drive readers crazy. As to acronyms, while it makes it even more confusing for people who don't understand the sport, the vast majority of the readers are people who do understand it. And for those who don't, it often wouldn't make a difference. If I wasn't a baseball fan, "earned run average" wouldn't make any more sense to me than "ERA". The biggest difference between American sports and European sports (I'm not familiar with MLS, so I'm not sure if this difference lies with the sport or where it's being played, MLS perhaps fits with European football or perhaps with sports such as baseball) is that American sports use way more terminology and statistics, not just from journalists, but talked about by fans, shown in stadiums, etc. If you watch a US baseball game, and a cricket game (not that cricket is all European, but it is non-US), you'll see that difference hugely. And that's actually something that fascinates me - I'm English, so such a big focus on stats wasn't a part of sport for me growing up, but once I got into NFL/MLB, I really love it. But, it still seems like something that most sports fans wouldnt care about, to me. Even though I know that they clearly do.
- nextparadigms 16y agoIsn't it clear already that robots are disruptive to the human kind(regarding jobs)? "Damn robots taking our jobs!" - That's what Jesse Jackson will say 10 years from now.
- tsiki 16y agoIf you're gonna complain about machines 'taking' humans' jobs, you're 300 years late to that party.
- Locke1689 16y agoWhile the article doesn't mention it, the Narrative Science software and company is a spin-off of this project[1], developed here at Northwestern University as a joint project between the Medill School of Journalism and the AI department. [1] http://infolab.northwestern.edu/projects/stats-monkey/ http://infolab.northwestern.edu/projects/stats-monkey/