Journalism generated by machine is on the rise
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Re: Journalism generated by machine is on the rise
#2Is AI the death of human creativity?
Assisted AI apparently now designs our cars and our planes, designs our logos, designs our buildings, generates our music.
More significantly, un-assisted AI curates what we are exposed to in the form of what's shown to us in our feeds and suggestions, and judging by the articles in OP, already is capable of writing articles for us. AI voices and news casters seem to be getting better by the day.
I can't tell where this is going anymore.
Re: Journalism generated by machine is on the rise
#3The thing is the majority of what humans consume is so structured [tv procedurals, romance/SF/fantasy novels, superhero comics, news, etc, ad nauseam] is so tightly structured you don't even need an AI to generate it, even just a markov generator will do it most of the time (someone had a project that generated quotes indistinguishable from 50 Shades of Grey). They'd already written screenplays on computers at MIT in the 60s. But even the high-end isn't saved; if Burroughs were alive today and in his 20s-30s, he'd probably being using computers for a modern generated 'cut-up' technique. Really, Dada was just ahead of the curve by a century.
Re: Journalism generated by machine is on the rise
#4My side project is a local news outlet for two small cities near me. They are small enough cities that I am the only game in town when it comes to digital media, the only competitor is the local newspaper who has no online presence. Plenty of our stories are actual news articles talking about local politics and new businesses/restaurants and local interest type stuff, all written by humans.
But filling in the gaps is plenty of machine-generated content. One of our big draws is the event calendar, and fortunately events give me enough data to feed an AI that I've developed. There is enough structured data and the information is so routine that this system can churn out several articles per day that sounds hand-written and every article sounds custom tailored to the business and the event itself. This fills in the routine work of keeping content flowing in between the stuff that takes a lot longer to research and write, and makes it viable for us (one full time employee and one part time employee) to run two popular small-town news websites where otherwise no one would even bother trying.
This is also a great case where classical AI is still relevant to modern problems. Neural networks just are not good at writing English in a way that humans would enjoy reading. At some point I plan on packaging it up and doing a Show HN, but for the time being, this article is spot on. Machine-generated news content breathes whole new life into an area that's increasingly hard to turn a profit.
Re: Journalism generated by machine is on the rise
#5Is AI the death of human creativity? Assisted AI apparently now designs our cars and our planes, designs our logos, designs our buildings, generates our music. More significantly, un-assisted AI curates what we are exposed to in the form of what's shown to us in our feeds and suggestions, and judging by the articles in OP, already is capable of writing articles for us. AI voices and news casters seem to be getting be…
I'd argue that this type of AI frees up humans to be more creative. If a journalist doesn't have to spend time writing routine articles about baseball scores, they have more time to spend tracking down real stories. I posted elsewhere in these comments about my own AI-powered news system, and if I didn't have that my entire day would be taken up writing routine articles that are interesting to readers but have very little journalistic value. Instead I can turn on the machine and let it write this routine content while I go out and interview the city manager about the proposed development downtown or the upcoming tax increase.
If the routine and mindless tasks of humans are moved to automation, those humans are now free to actually create.
Re: Journalism generated by machine is on the rise
#6> “I hope we’ll see A.I. tools become a productivity tool in the practice of reporting and finding clues,” said Hilary Mason, the general manager for machine learning at Cloudera, a data management software company. “When you do data analysis, you can see anomalies and patterns using A.I. And a human journalist is the right person to understand and figure out.”
While there's been a lot of great stuff happening on the front of machine-generated news for a while now, data analysis is definitely another great target, with perhaps some more immediate gains, when it comes to AI / general automation in journalism.
Re: Journalism generated by machine is on the rise
#7My side project is a local news outlet for two small cities near me. They are small enough cities that I am the only game in town when it comes to digital media, the only competitor is the local newspaper who has no online presence. Plenty of our stories are actual news articles talking about local politics and new businesses/restaurants and local interest type stuff, all written by humans. But filling in the gaps is…
Id be really interested in your technical approach to this. How did you implement this in a high level?
Re: Journalism generated by machine is on the rise
#8Just like HackerNews comments.
Somewhat seriously, I know someone out there is posting AI generated HN comments and testing it here. With the proper timing/rates/etc... it wouldn't be hard to avoid easy detection. I don't have specific accounts in mind, but I have a hard time believing no-one is trying it out (given the overlap of HN with AI enthusiasts).
So the real question is: can anyone detect the AI comments?
Re: Journalism generated by machine is on the rise
#9It's worth asking whether "thousands of articles on company earnings reports each quarter" constitutes journalism.
Re: Journalism generated by machine is on the rise
#10It's worth asking whether "thousands of articles on company earnings reports each quarter" constitutes journalism.
I think the obvious answer is "if it can be done by a machine today, it's not journalism". It's stuff that journalists are expected to do, but it's busy work that takes time away from actual journalism.