Could a Computer Write This Story? 101
An anonymous reader tips an article at CNN about the development of technology that automates the process of writing news articles. It started with simple sports reporting, but now at least one company is setting its sights on more complicated articles. Quoting:
"Narrative Science then began branching out into finance and other topics that are driven heavily by data. Soon, Hammond says, large companies came looking for help sorting huge amounts of data themselves. 'I think the place where this technology is absolutely essential is the area that's loosely referred to as big data,' Hammond said. 'So almost every company in the world has decided at one point that in order to do a really good job, they need to meter and monitor everything.' ... Meanwhile, Hammond says Narrative Science is looking to eventually expand into long form news stories. That's an idea that's unsettling to some journalism experts."
Think of all (Score:1)
A better question (Score:3, Funny)
Could a Computer Write Better Stories on Slashdot?
YES.
Re:A better question (Score:5, Insightful)
Could a Computer Write Better Stories on Slashdot?
Slashdot summaries would be fairly well suited to being done by computer. They are usually taken from existing articles available on the web. They follow a straightforward format that is largely a quote/summary of the article. Occasionally they provide links to previous stories on the same topic. Computers can already do those things. You could even have an algorithm to put in random typos. I'm not sure how successful a computer would be at generating the tag lines like "from the kicking-newspaper-writers-when-they're-down dept.", but the rest seems doable. If slashdot were run by a bunch of geeks with the desire to do so, the story process could probably be automated, including the process of finding and rating interesting stories by by scanning various sites.
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In fact, I stop reading slashdot summaries as soon as I decided whether I want to read the article or not. Otherwise I keep reading the same material over and over again, which is a waste of my time. Better slashdot summaries would be welcome, yes. The current crop waste time and aren't very strong indicators, as in there's a fairly high "oh the article was crap after all" percentage.
Story moderation (Score:2)
People have been asking for the ability to moderate the stories once they hit the front page, not just the comments and the firehose.
The stupid "like" and "+1" buttons don't have the same effect. If there are 100 +1s, that means nothing by itself - for example, if the story has 1,0000 -1s or "hates" it helps put any up-rating into context.
So a "200 people liked this story, 5,000 said it sucked" would be appreciated.
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Computers can already do those things
they can't. for now they only produce eliza-like simulations on very restricted domains. just look at the crap examples that fluff company exposes on their site, then consider that's the best they can come up with.
I'm not sure how successful a computer would be at generating the tag lines like "from the kicking-newspaper-writers-when-they're-down dept.", but the rest seems doable.
so composing and abstract is "already done" and a tag line is "would be?". you haven't thought a lot about this, did you?
the real nut here is not just "parse some data" but extract a semantic model out from some text (pcik your domain, ofc), then you need a reasoning/inferential engine with a met
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I'm not sure how successful a computer would be at generating the tag lines like "from the kicking-newspaper-writers-when-they're-down dept.", but the rest seems doable.
so composing and abstract is "already done" and a tag line is "would be?". you haven't thought a lot about this, did you?
Do you understand the difference between extracting a quote from an existing text vs. creating new completely text intended to be humorous?
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sorry, sir, no. guess i had the wrong meta-model loaded ...
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3 d animation (Score:1)
3d animation , a computer made voice and now a computer making the story
WHY do we need copyright again then?
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To make sure the computer made millionaires keep getting paid all their computer made money.
You can automate totals, not faxts. (Score:2)
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Then the journalists are fucked. What most of them do is rewriting press releases submitted by companies, copying subscription news stories, and maybe adding a critical sentence or two cribbed from wikipedia.
If by "fucked" you mean, "likely to switch to a job that isn't quite so mind numbingly repetitive and pointless," then, yes, they are fucked. Many people will be fired, yes I've been there, it sucks, but they will all find new jobs, and they will mostly be better off in the long run.
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What you're implying is that humans will always have a role, but that role is entirely on the fringes of the economy, as high value consumers and as low value producers. All the value added stuff, the selection, a
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You can't make a computer make the decision whether the play was a hit by the batter or an error by the fielder yet.
This sentence seems to be implying that the newspaper reporter is the one that decides whether to score a play a hit or an error. The article is about automated generation of newspaper articles, not computer-refereed sports.
Editor AI (Score:2)
Yes, it could, although I hope they can do it better than the AI used to edit and post this story.
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In my experience, humans have a tendency to overestimate their intelligence and the intelligence of our species. I specialize in automating "knowledge tasks." The people that I work with are very often surprised at just how much of what they think of as requiring human intelligence can actually be broken down into algorithms that are then applied to the data. Very little of what people actually do on a daily basis is more than the algorithmic application of knowledge.
I agree that there are some things compu
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"..., but I doubt we'll be seeing computers creating truly original works of art or literature in the near future."
Can _you_ do it?
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The computers and robots still can't do the jobs I can do yet. But I won't be surprised if many McD workers could be replaced by a "glorified vending machine" that makes and sells McD's products. When tech improves enough so it becomes more cost effective (which might not be that far off given what McD does),
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"In my experience, humans have a tendency to overestimate their intelligence and the intelligence of our species. I specialize in automating "knowledge tasks." The people that I work with are very often surprised at just how much of what they think of as requiring human intelligence can actually be broken down into algorithms that are then applied to the data. Very little of what people actually do on a daily basis is more than the algorithmic application of knowledge.
I agree that there are some things comp
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No, I'm serious. there are somethings computers can do and some they can't. You can't tell a computer to watch news come in and output a newscast.
Actually ... you can,sort of.
Voice recognition -> extracting facts from text -> story generation. All three are currently functional processes (varying degrees of quality). Having C3PO observe an arbitrary event, "understand" by inferring meaning (mathematics, probability, context database) and generate a report is not nearly so far out of reach as we might imagine. It is currently out of reach because each step introduces error rates that would result in hilarious crap, so the short-term R&D focu
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>Editors like the kind on Slashdot are hard to automate.
you're joking, right?
Artificial stupidity simply hasn't progressed to that point yet. Don't worry, though, the worst minds are working on it!
No (Score:2)
How news is written (Score:5, Funny)
"${subject} ${verb} ${object}," said a source inside the ${CurrentPresident} ${administration} who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press.
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Yahoo! Finance has been using this sort of AI for a long time now.
Stock goes up after earnings: "XXX went up after posting 20% higher profit"
Stock goes down again a few minutes later: "XXX went down after posting earnings that were lower than analysts expected"
Stock goes back up again a few minutes later: back to first version
(I'm not exaggerating, I've seen this happen many times)
Same thing with "futures pointing up because investors are happy about xxx", then "market opened down because investors are afra
Humans doo it batter (Score:1)
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What makes you think such a quality is needed or desired in a writer for most newspaper editors?
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Easy! (Score:5, Funny)
void main (void) {
printf("First Post!\n");
}
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Wise guy, eh?
/dev/null
#!/bin/sh
# reads post from standard input
grep -i "First Post" >
if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
exit 255
fi
No, no, no, it's just:
#!/bin/sh
grep -ivq "First Post"
A shell script will always exit with the last return code, so the exit is redundant... -q is "quiet" meaning grep will stop at the first match and just return error or success. -v will negate.
Incidentally, comparing $? is usually redundant:
if do_stuff
then echo it worked
else echo FAILURE
fi
The [ ] (or the preferred [[ ]] in bash) is just a command like any other. Use if ! command to swap clauses.
It's also worth looking in the man pages at how [[ ]] and (( )
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We don't know who struck first, us or them. But we do know it was us that scorched the sky.
my @first = qw(first frist fisrt f1rst fir$t);
my @post = qw(post po$t p0st psot p0$t po$t poast);
my $first_post = $first[int(rand(scalar(@first)))] . " " . $post[int(rand(scalar(@post)))];
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Fail for not including stdio.h.
main is supposed to return an int.
There's no substitution in the string so puts would be way more efficient and would save you precious microseconds in your quest for First Post.
Already Been Done (Score:4, Insightful)
Already posted here (Score:1)
with regards to sports news. [slashdot.org].
Here is a swatch of today's baseball news [statsheet.com], courtesy of writer bots.
Sure you can automate... (Score:2)
But will whatever is output make any sense and be verifiable?
To quote thusly:
How can the purple yeti be so red,
Or chestnuts, like a widgeon, calmly groan?
No sheep is quite as crooked as a bed,
Though chickens ever try to hide a bone.
I grieve that greasy turnips slowly march:
Indeed, inflated is the icy pig:
For as the alligator strikes the larch,
So sighs the grazing goldfish for a wig.
Oh, has the pilchard argued with a top?
Say never that the parsnip is too weird!
I tell thee that a wolf-man will not hop
And no m
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It is 34 year old computer history.
You may want to check and see if your geek dues have been paid up.
--
BMO
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You may want to check and see if your geek dues have been paid up.
--
BMO
I tried to use bitcoins but the only think they would accept was a check.
I wonder what claims of copyright this will bring? (Score:2)
We've seen more than we want with regards to claims of copyright over news and information. Copyrights are supposed to be reserved to "creative works." Computer output should not be considered creative works... at least not until AI is advanced enough that machines can think on their own. (I had to write that... our future overlords will read all of this and decide to select me for extermination.)
Seems like the further we go along, the more absurd these things become.
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Computer output should not be considered creative works...
It's not that simple. Presumably, output created purely from factual data isn't, but if the input is already a creative work, then the output is a copyrighted derivative; for example, binaries produced by compilers are still copyrighted by the source code author.
So, if they write the program to analyze an existing corpus of articles and create new ones based on it (and a database of new facts), I'd say the result could be considered a derivative work, owned by whoever owns the copyright of that corpus.
You mean they aren't already? (Score:5, Insightful)
Could have fooled me.
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Stories generated by software (especially open source software) from large databases of facts would have the advantage that it would be more likely to be free of bias. I think this sort of story would be still leave room for editorials, opinion pieces, commentaries, suggestions for what went wrong and how to improve things, interviews, and research, so journalists have nothing to worry about. The flavour of some of the major news outfits would have a decidedly different flavour though.
Please use it to replace news commentary hosts. (Score:1)
You know I'm wondering about this (Score:2)
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Those are just tools to enhance productivity. This, spammers will be all over this. There's already a significant cottage industry in getting topics and writing articles for them to game the search engines, what these guys do then is "spin" the articles into hundreds of other articles by swapping around the sentences. One can earn a few dollars per article, with careful rules about the number of keywords and their placement. If the process becomes automated I reckon it will throw search engine results into
Uh no... (Score:2)
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Anyway... What are we going to do with all these people?
There was a movie about that. I think it was the only time Edward G. Robinson did SciFi.
There's definetly something going on already (Score:1)
I have to say that for the past two years news stories have been degrading in quality and actual syntax or structure; going from cohesive chunks of texts with start and finish to simple conglomerates of non connecting paragraphs. I do not know if this is; (a) a result of journalists becoming more and more lazy due to the high output of stories they need to pump, (b) they are becoming more and more retarded as national education deteriorates, or (c) the technology is already out there and they are keeping co
General Hammond (Score:2)
Did anyone else mentally read this summary in General Hammond from Stargate's voice? :D
I've developed something similar. (Score:3)
When I worked a bit at EA, as a gameplay programmer on the Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2010 project, one of the things I worked on the scripting/event/audio system that makes the announcers react to the player's actions.
The main task of such an event engine is, working with a finite pool of reactions, it knows what it has said over a given time period, and tuning it so it doesn't repeat a phrase too often, and using it to fill as much 'empty air' as we can while it hasn't reached an annoying threshold.
The problem in that case, of course is that we only got to record so many responses with a professional voice actor, and only so much room on the disc.
With a news response engine, you wouldn't have it respond to everything - you'd have a very specific class of stories used to patch holes, the kind that is already nearly automatic already. Grabbing retweets, say "this person said this about this person", send it to an editor for review, then use it to fill gaps in a web page layout.
But then you'd still have to balance the rate of repetition of such types of news stories - which is a game of novelty and adaptive tuning.
It's certainly possible - but given the company, I expect it to be used for a while with lots of embarrassing things the editors miss showing up, until the marketing crew discovers they can use it to inject advertising messages into news stream. This input from several sources gaming the system will lead to it becoming useless over time, leading to it eventually being reinvented independently several times.
Meanwhile, Fox news will become a 24/7 lottery news channel - you too can become rich! They'll put parts of a lottery number in each commercial, then have the exact same news hosts as now tell people about how much you have to gain, using traditional conservative talking points to bolster the appeal.
MSNBC? They'll just keep selling airtime to infomercials when they can - they've already become the costs-nothing-to-produce-prison-shows channel.
Ryan Fenton
Newspeak makes it easier for computers to write... (Score:4, Funny)
so nobody needs to understand anything (Score:2)
The value of a human writer over the dumping of raw data is that the writer, you hope, had taken the time to understand what the facts mean, how they might affect you and what is more or less important among the facts. Also, what "facts" are controversial or just too fanciful to be credited at all.
I would expect an automated report to have perfect grammar and to relate whatever facts were input, but be devoid of any insight and to have confusing presentation of material and ambiguous statements.
+1 to the service panel of backlit Lexan cassettes (Score:2)
The secret sauce in a Slashdot story summary is alarmist imprecision.
The problem with this venture as a business model is that when you fully automate a human process with no value add, it tips the lack of value-add from painfully obvious to gratingly obvious in some subtle way. The least trace of eau-de-uncanny-valley causes the sleeping princess to finally notice the pea. The pea is then perp-walked out of the castle, and the cycle continues.
The first thing we do, let's kill all the similes.
Rooting for t
Could be important for businesses (Score:2)
A computer? No. (Score:2)
Totonto shoots, blocked by Toronto! (Score:2)
"Toronto recovers for Toronto, and now Toronto is running the Toronto to the Toronto... it's a Toronto! Toronto has done won Toronto! [Watson subroutine 100010101101, please use less pronouns]" -Watson editing subroutine 100010101110
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Someone please re-program Watson to know when to use "less" and when to use "fewer".
All jobs (Score:2)
Why would I want an article then? (Score:1)
An icon paints a 1000 words (Score:1)
Anyway, define 'write'.
Weather Reports, Obituaries, Graduation Notifications -- it's all been thought
of many decades ago.
Fox-A-Matic (Score:1)
Foxnews decided to save money by auto-generating the facts also ;-)
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The movies that we see nowadays are already written by computer.
.
I just read the first paragraph or so of a synopsis of the plot of the new movie "Battleship". There's no way to program a computer to put up with that much illogic.
Asimov predicted this (Score:2)