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In Case You Wondered, a Real Human Wrote This Column
- thalecress 15y agoI'm skeptical of the claim that a program could win a Pulitzer. How does it decide what to write about, who to interview, and what questions to ask? Reporting a day at the races or the markets is easy because we know which kinds of data are relevant and we have them available.
- dr_ 15y agoIt's not inconceivable that, as AI advances, at some point there with be algorithms that figure out the questions you have posed.
- arethuza 15y agoTrue, it's not inconceivable, but arguably having a system that is an effective investigative journalist is AI-Complete: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI-complete http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI-complete
- nl 15y agoThis is true but like most things has to do with AI has limitations. In some fields (eg, finance) one can conceive a computer based process that would do a better job than most investigative journalists. It can't deal with missing data, but it can discover inaccuracies, unusual events and suspicious patterns and in some limited fields this is enough. For example, an AI based process might have been just as good at finding the problems at Enron as conventional journalists were (since it the problems there were mostly uncovered by forensic accounting on their public balance sheets): But hard information was scarce. "It's almost as if you have to use forensic accountants when you're doing a company story because many companies are using very aggressive accounting techniques that are perfectly legal," Shepard says. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64769-2002Jan17.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64769-2002Jan...
- lexicon 15y agoThis is a recent email I got from Facebook Support team regarding a vanity url for my business. I could swear this guy is a robot or a script, and I wonder if Facebook is using the technology described in the article: ---------------- We’re sorry, but we’re unable to process your request because another entity has made a previous request concerning this username. If you are still interested in claiming the username, you may contact us in 60 days for an update about its availability. --- You have reached the right channel for these requests. As mentioned earlier, we have no further information to share with you concerning the username "xxxx" (marked out). We will be unable to assist you further from this alias. ---------------- What human being talks like that?
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- ugh 15y agoA human who had to write several dozen support answers? Naming collisions have to be a common occurrence for Facebook. It’s sufficient to write exactly one mail for such cases. There is no need to re-write or change things around, it’s always the same answer to the same question. Using a robot to write stuff like that seems wasteful – I don’t even think it would currently be possible.
- ori_b 15y agoIt's probably a template. Someone read it, and picked "template-name-conflict-XYZ" to respond with.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- kiba 15y agoThese technological advances made me shudder about the potential job loss of the future even though the previous technological advances created new jobs. Sure, there's no way that my profession and the great majority of jobs on the internet would be possible if we rely on human switchboard operators rather than relying on automation. That doesn't mean it will be true for the next advances in technology, does it?
- sliverstorm 15y agoThe problem I have with that line of thinking is it encourages halting the progress of technology based on fear of the unknown, a classic human foible.
- notahacker 15y agoIf the cost of producing even the sort of dry, statistics-heavy content the program presently excels at was a primary factor then we'd have outsourced it to India or the Philippines by now. You'd certainly pay less than $10 for an article like this: http://www.builderonline.com/local-housing-data/new-england/manchester-nashua-nh.aspx http://www.builderonline.com/local-housing-data/new-england/... I'm willing to believe the underlying machine learning technology is very clever, but I'm also willing to believe a specialised toy script could produce similar results, even if you had to hard code the minimum winning margin for a "rout". As for the Freakonomics comparison, they seem to have missed the appeal of Levitt: that his ability to posit a plausible causal relationship between two apparently unrelated variables. Any idiot can summarise "remarkable findings" based on spurious correlations.
- bergie 15y agoFun idea: produce similar autogenerated narratives on commit activity of various open source projects Bergie had a strong start on the office day, closing four bugs in row. Then luck turned and he broke the build...
- SwellJoe 15y agoThis has been a common fear in the face of pretty much every new technology. All past holders of this view have been proven incorrect. Do you want to bet that today (or tomorrow, or next month) is the first time in all of history that it will be correct?
- kia 15y agoSingle page: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/business/computer-generated-articles-are-gaining-traction.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/business/computer-generate...
- guygurari 15y agoPage One [1] is a browser extension that automatically redirects you to the single-page version of articles on popular news sites, including NYT. Works great for me. [1] http://globalmoxie.com/blog/page-one-safari-chrome-extension.shtml http://globalmoxie.com/blog/page-one-safari-chrome-extension...
- kia 15y agoBut doesn't work with Firefox.
- levy 15y agoMy worry here is computers will learn to write articles specific to every individual. The computer will know what other articles we liked and what we didn't like and just try to write to what we want to read. This will make it even less likely we'll hear an opposing view to our own, if the computers are giving us what we want to read.
- zalthor 15y agoWe don't need computers to do this, people do it already. Most "news" channels spew out such a monotonous train of thought, that it makes me wonder if switching to a news channel these days is even worth it. For now, I am able to get my news and information online from a variety of sources that offer me interesting views on both sides. Even if one day all of this is content produced by machines, I think its the individual's responsibility to make sure that he/she gets information from both sides.
- sjs 15y agoI suppose this may do for articles that just deliver some facts. However the kind of stuff I enjoy reading doesn't just barf up some facts in the form of sentences, it provides insight into what the implications of those facts may be and also draws from the past to better put things in context. That's not to say their technology couldn't be improved to search the web and see what past events are relevant, but providing good insights about the implications of the facts will be a whole lot tougher. I don't think journalists need to be shaking in their boots unless they only deliver the quality and depth of results that this algorithm delivers.
- 6ren 15y agoI love seeing these examples of product development: begin with a very specific niche at the edge (not tackling the mainstream head-on) and "target non-consumption" - that way, you have no competition; and it's not a zero-sum game where you beat someone, but creating value that never existed before. This is possible not because it's good, but because it's cheap (and good enough): > primarily a low-cost tool ... for local youth sports .... and financial results of local public companies ... “Mostly, we’re doing things that are not being done otherwise,” Then, once you have some customers - any customers! - you improve it, bit by bit. It doesn't need to be perfect in the first place; it doesn't need to be perfect in the end. It just needs to be good enough to be useful. > [customer] worked with Narrative Science for months to fine-tune the software As for the technology itself, we're not told anything of its details, just what it can do. This is a marketing article, not a tech report. It would be interesting to see the models they use for stories, and whether they use grammars for the overall structure. These are very narrow domains, which are the easiest to start with: you could enumerate all the standard cliches, understand when they apply, and tweak the model. That's where the journalist expert domain knowledge of the two founders would come in handy. BTW: "easiest" is only relative - it would still be very difficult (almost impossible), and kudos to these guys for actually doing it - and even better, making an actual business out of it. It reads like a 50's Asimov story - the future is finally arriving. But a Pulitzer in 5 years is absurd, either cynical puff or visionary bravado. Theoretically possible, I think, maybe in 50 years - the figure I've long given for strong AI. ;-)
- tomahhy 15y agoCurious, what do you mean by "target non-consumption"?
- 6ren 15y agoIt means target people with needs that aren't being met. Those people are not consuming (i.e. buying and using) a product or service to address their problem. It's clearest to see when a product exists to solve a problem, but it's too expensive for some people (or some situation). In the article, the problem of reporting on local sports/financials has a solution (reporters), but the value of that news isn't worth their time: their time is too expensive. So the newspaper doesn't "consume" a solution to the problem of reporting that particular news. By targeting this non-consumption, the startup doesn't compete against reporters (yet...), so it provokes no desperate fight for survival. It's an term from Clayton Christensen, who wrote The Innovator's Dilemma, though he doesn't use it til "The Innovator's Solution", and expands on it in "Seeing What's Next".
- talbina 15y agoDid they write an entire two page article while ignoring the real leader in this space, in my opinion: http://statsheet.com/ http://statsheet.com/
- hyperbovine 15y agoA computer never would have missed that.
- jgilliam 15y agoIf a computer had written this article, maybe it would have mentioned how useful this technology is for spammers.
- alexandros 15y agoI've said it before, sufficiently advanced spam is indistinguishable from content. If this comes to pass, I'm not sure who will have won the spam wars, but I'm. Inclined to say that the low end content authors will have lost it.
- LiveTheDream 15y agoRelevant: http://xkcd.com/810/ http://xkcd.com/810/
- jellicle 15y agoWhat this article doesn't tell you is that the human who wrote it works for Narrative Science. For those who don't know, if you see a story in your local paper, and it doesn't involve a car crash, crime, weather, or sports, it was probably placed there by a PR representative. Most of the things you read are not the result of random reporters deciding to cover X or Y, but a paid, concerted effort to place story X or Y in the paper by providing the paper with a fully pre-digested story to perhaps rewrite, or perhaps not. The words "narrative science" appear 14 times in that story, including such clunkers as "To generate story “angles,” explains Mr. Hammond of Narrative Science...." when Mr. Hammond has already been introduced earlier in the story. It even includes pricing: hey readers, this is not only cool and will win the Pulitzer Prize, but it's cheap too! No mention of competitors... It reads like an ad because it is an ad. This story was provided, probably almost word for word, by a PR person to the NYT reporter. I'm not sure if computer-generated text will be better or worse than the media system we have now.
- andrewljohnson 15y agoThat's a jaded and misguided view of the world. Very few reporters will accept articles written by others, and they predominantly work for trade rags, not the New York Times.
- dsplittgerber 15y agoPlease tell me you read that article and didn't find it odd how extremely one-sided and positive it was. Also, it happens all the time. And with a publishing machine as big as the NYT, it's bound to happen there as well. Remember Jayson Blair? Different symptom, same cause.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- scott_s 15y agoThere's a difference between PG's submarine articles and the PR person literally writing the article.
- jawns 15y agoHere's a description of my venture into this territory, in which I generated formulaic lottery result briefs: "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 can't imagine the sort of code base that would be needed to make these stories not seem formulaic.
- TorKlingberg 15y agoI wonder if these automatically generated articles will ever become good enough to be worth reading. Currently, they seem to be just good enough to fool Google, and convince people to click the link. Do any sports fans bookmark and come back to these sites? No matter how good the algorithms get, they are still limited by their input, the statistics. If for example a player scores a very unusual goal, say a bicycle kick in soccer, then a real writer who actually saw the match would surely mention it. An algorithm could not if there is no field for unusual goal in the match statistics.
- RobbieStats 15y agoStill a long way to go, but the content is getting better. Here is a recent article from StatSheet: http://bosoxball.com/boston-red-sox/game-recap/red-sox-defeat-rangers-12-7 http://bosoxball.com/boston-red-sox/game-recap/red-sox-defea...
- cageface 15y agoI think I'd rather see more innovative ways of representing the history of a sporting event graphically instead of trying to replicate the relatively inane blow-by-blow that you currently get from real sports journalists. Maybe though if this kind of thing continues to improve the humans will have to start doing more serious analysis instead of fluff coverage.
- SwellJoe 15y agoThis is pretty fascinating stuff, despite the limitations and obvious bias of this article. Are there any Open Source libraries or papers which cover toy implementations of this sort of thing? (Assuming, of course, that it is not simply a bunch of if/else constructs applied to templates, which would be far less interesting.)
- jack7890 15y agoIf this works as advertised, it would have important (bad) consequences for SEO, right?
- jasonshen 15y agoThis reminds me of what MarketBrief is doing for financial documents. Definitely less color / variance in the stories though. http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/15/yc-funded-marketbrief-makes-obtuse-sec-documents-human-friendly/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/15/yc-funded-marketbrief-makes...
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- mkramlich 15y agoMaking a note here: add some shiny around my Python template engine and I can land $6m investment.
- nl 15y agoFor those interested, the best source of research in this field is the "Special Interest Group on Natural Language Generation": http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/siggen.html http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/siggen.html
- dredmorbius 15y agoObXKCD: http://xkcd.com/904/ http://xkcd.com/904/ There are certain topical areas which lend themselves to automated content generation. Sports, financial news, weather, astronomy (astrology isn't worth mentioning), earthquakes and other severe events, machine monitoring. Domains in which a quantified or measured outcome tied to a specific point in time or event (final score, market close, daily forecast, etc.) occurs. The important data has already been highlighted, all you've got to do is sprinkle some syntactic sugar around it. Oddly enough, these are areas in which you're already most likely to find existing "AI"-type content generators. In areas in which you've got to do significant determination of what is salient, the approach isn't nearly as successful.