Journalism generated by machine is on the rise

About eight years ago, I landed my first full-time software development job in part because of a walkthrough I gave during my in-person interview process of a tool I'd developed while working for a metro daily newspaper. It wrote lottery results stories with the click of a button.

Writing those results stories was a daily chore. We would look up the state's daily lottery results and also report Powerball and Mega Millions results. For those larger lotteries, we'd also adjust our headlines depending on whether there was a big winner in our state. But aside from that, it was just tedious and formulaic, so I wrote a script that would hit the various lottery sites, scrape the data, and generate a two- or three-paragraph story that was ready to post. It took the task down from five minutes to five seconds. (I later worked on a similar tool for generating short weather reports and alerts.)

Since then, I've worked on other NLG stuff, and honestly, it's pretty hard, and the topic really has to be data-driven to begin with; we're probably decades away from really insightful NLG that offers "why" explanations, as opposed to "what" or "how" descriptions.

The other tough challenge about computer-generated journalism is that getting the data is often the hardest part of the process. Oh, sure, businesses are going to release their quarterly earnings reports, and sports teams are going to release their game data. You might even use computer-assisted reporting to generate FOIA requests for data that governments are required by law to release upon request. But you're not going to write a story that leads to Nixon's resignation or Enron's collapse simply by asking for the data.

As this[1] article puts it: 'And it also illustrated how much people tend to anthropomorphize AI, believing that it has deep-seated beliefs rather than seeing it as a statistical machine.'

But, really, have we proved there is anything to such romantic or spiritual notions about human beings, or are we just 'statistical machines'?

Anyway, my test for an AI-generated comment: determine a measure for 'sensicalness', the higher the score (aka, more sensical) the higher the probability of non-human origin.

[1]https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610634/microsofts-neo-naz...

[b] Really, I think our definition of human comes not from the mind but from the body. That's always the definition we deploy, whether it's for or against racism or abortion or...anything else, really. Even a brain in a jar is still defined in terms of being a brain in a jar. This is probably why the internet, as was known before, will go away, will cede to the 'video-sphere', when we invented writing, (such as this message) we divorced the content from human embodiment, so we could never be sure, even all the way back then, if we were looking at something composed by man or gods or...anything.

I hope the financial reporters (or whatever they're called) would be free to do more digging into anomalies, and have more help spotting those anomalies, thanks to software.