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In this economy, software developers are in extremely high demand and journalists are a dime a dozen. What's the value in building software to do the job of jou

by aqme28 15y ago

In this economy, software developers are in extremely high demand and journalists are a dime a dozen. What's the value in building software to do the job of journalists? That said, it's a really neat idea and I'm curious to see this technology mature.

vibrunazo 15y ago
It's much more fun to code a robot than to hire a journalist :-) But also, once you get to massive robot production, then the amount of journalists will seem small. Think of content personalized to each user. Real time description of things around you in your software. In our startup we plan to have a robot write the plot for user generated games based on their custom settings. Hiring a writer for each use would certainly increase our costs.
- knowtheory 15y ago
  Explain to me why this isn't techno-utopian claptrap? The thing that frustrates me about the way that Narrative Science is discussed and some of the unhinged techno-futurism stuff that people write, is that it's never about making people or individuals more effective. Automated processes and people have different strengths. Computers really aren't that great at pretending that they're people, and people are bad at accuracy on repetitive tasks. That people keep on talking about "replacing" so-and-so misses the point. Change their market, change their workflows, make them better at accomplishing the function journalists or whomever play in society. Endeavoring to make them obsolete is both unnecessarily inflammatory and also not terribly sensible.
  - vibrunazo 15y ago
    We don't wanna replace them as the end goal. We simply have repetitive tasks that could be automated. Whether that automation will, in fact, replace journalists or assist them. Is another problem that depends on your specific implementation details and economics. For our company specific use. Hiring a writer to be assisted by our robots would just add unnecessary cost to the process and delay to the end user experience. Versus pretty much little to no gain in quality. We only need a simple transformation from structured data to narrated english, and we want lots of it to be delivered instantly to our users. It just makes more sense for applications like ours to have robots replace humans.
  - Retric 15y ago
    Individuals may be more flexible than computers, but large groups of people tend to be less so. Compare the effort MacDonald's needs to deploy a new recipe with the effort it takes Google to change pagerank and I don't think people come out ahead.
- aqme28 15y ago
  Pretty sure you could hire an unpaid intern who would do that happily, which would hardly cost you anything.
beambot 15y ago
Curious anecdote: Elon Musk started out in this field, which gave him the capital to do X.com/Paypal (among his more recent endeavors). From [1]: He stayed two days [at Stanford] before dropping out to start Zip2, which provided online content publishing software for news organizations, with his brother Kimbal Musk. In 1999, Compaq's AltaVista division acquired Zip2 for US$307 million in cash and US$34 million in stock options. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk
CWuestefeld 15y ago
As I read this piece, it got me thinking that if the actual inputs into an article are known, as is the writing process, then it will force us to confront the biases in our news. Either: (a) stories will be more objective, and provably so; (b) editors will need to consciously decide how the algorithms should slant (and this itself would be discoverable, if only by leaks); or (c) we'll learn that the underlying datasets were assembled in a way that is more critical of one side or another.

by aqme28 15y ago

vibrunazo 15y ago

It's much more fun to code a robot than to hire a journalist :-) But also, once you get to massive robot production, then the amount of journalists will seem small. Think of content personalized to each user. Real time description of things around you in your software. In our startup we plan to have a robot write the plot for user generated games based on their custom settings. Hiring a writer for each use would certainly increase our costs.

knowtheory 15y ago
Explain to me why this isn't techno-utopian claptrap? The thing that frustrates me about the way that Narrative Science is discussed and some of the unhinged techno-futurism stuff that people write, is that it's never about making people or individuals more effective. Automated processes and people have different strengths. Computers really aren't that great at pretending that they're people, and people are bad at accuracy on repetitive tasks. That people keep on talking about "replacing" so-and-so misses the point. Change their market, change their workflows, make them better at accomplishing the function journalists or whomever play in society. Endeavoring to make them obsolete is both unnecessarily inflammatory and also not terribly sensible.
- vibrunazo 15y ago
  We don't wanna replace them as the end goal. We simply have repetitive tasks that could be automated. Whether that automation will, in fact, replace journalists or assist them. Is another problem that depends on your specific implementation details and economics. For our company specific use. Hiring a writer to be assisted by our robots would just add unnecessary cost to the process and delay to the end user experience. Versus pretty much little to no gain in quality. We only need a simple transformation from structured data to narrated english, and we want lots of it to be delivered instantly to our users. It just makes more sense for applications like ours to have robots replace humans.
- Retric 15y ago
  Individuals may be more flexible than computers, but large groups of people tend to be less so. Compare the effort MacDonald's needs to deploy a new recipe with the effort it takes Google to change pagerank and I don't think people come out ahead.
aqme28 15y ago
Pretty sure you could hire an unpaid intern who would do that happily, which would hardly cost you anything.

beambot 15y ago

Curious anecdote: Elon Musk started out in this field, which gave him the capital to do X.com/Paypal (among his more recent endeavors). From [1]: He stayed two days [at Stanford] before dropping out to start Zip2, which provided online content publishing software for news organizations, with his brother Kimbal Musk. In 1999, Compaq's AltaVista division acquired Zip2 for US$307 million in cash and US$34 million in stock options. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk

CWuestefeld 15y ago

As I read this piece, it got me thinking that if the actual inputs into an article are known, as is the writing process, then it will force us to confront the biases in our news. Either: (a) stories will be more objective, and provably so; (b) editors will need to consciously decide how the algorithms should slant (and this itself would be discoverable, if only by leaks); or (c) we'll learn that the underlying datasets were assembled in a way that is more critical of one side or another.