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Journalism generated by machine is on the rise

nytimes.com

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Re: Journalism generated by machine is on the rise

#21

Post by rchaud »

> The program can dissect a financial report the moment it appears and spit out an immediate news story that includes the most pertinent facts and figures.

As an accountant in a prior life, I can tell you that this approach won't provide anything near "the most pertinent facts". That's because public earnings reports are written specifically to circumvent automated analysis. Wall Street firms have tools in place to scrape the data tables from those PDFs, and even then the technology isn't perfect, because layouts aren't standardized (merged cells, table built in InDesign, etc).

At best, it will get the headline numbers right, which are meaningless without context. What does a quarterly profit of $3.3m for MSTR mean without benchmarking against its competitors, or taking the macroeconomic environment (interest rates, etc) into account?

The headline numbers on the balance sheet, P&L and cash flow statement don't say nearly as much as the notes to those statements, which often contain minute details that are extremely relevant for investors and analysts. Trained accountants and analysts can miss details when reading through those, so how is AI going to parse it any better?

Unfortunately, this smacks of "quantity of articles" over quality of analysis, the latter of which represents why journalism is valuable and necessary.

Re: Journalism generated by machine is on the rise

#22

Post by frogpelt »

ChrisLTD wrote: post #20
Alterlife wrote: post #2

Is 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 think we'll see an explosion in AI created works, and then a countermovement to only consume things crafted by humans. Sort of like what we've been seeing with "organic" foods but for music, art, and news.

You will also (and already do) see deliberate efforts to disconnect from the artificial, virtual world and reconnect with the physical world: unplug retreats, etc.

Re: Journalism generated by machine is on the rise

#23

Post by moorhosj »

rchaud wrote: post #21

> The program can dissect a financial report the moment it appears and spit out an immediate news story that includes the most pertinent facts and figures. As an accountant in a prior life, I can tell you that this approach won't provide anything near "the most pertinent facts". That's because public earnings reports are written specifically to circumvent automated analysis. Wall Street firms have tools in place to s…

==What does a quarterly profit of $3.3m for MSTR mean without benchmarking against its competitors, or taking the macroeconomic environment (interest rates, etc) into account?==

This doesn't seem that difficult to implement into a story. There are 125 earnings reports today [1], a retelling of the headline numbers with competitor analysis should fit the bill for reporting on most of them.

==Trained accountants and analysts can miss details when reading through those, so how is AI going to parse it any better?==

How could we expect a journalist to parse it better? Is that really the goal of news on financial reports?

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/calendar/earnings/

Re: Journalism generated by machine is on the rise

#24

Post by frogpelt »

astazangasta wrote: post #13
Alterlife wrote: post #2

Is 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…

This is like the argument that photographs are the death of art. Turns out they didn't even kill figurative art.

I would argue that abstract painting became popular about the time photography become somewhat common.

Photographs took up the mantle of depicting reality and painting became more about visual expression of feelings, perhaps.

Re: Journalism generated by machine is on the rise

#25

Post by thfuran »

apocalypstyx wrote: post #3

The 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…

You're not going to get a (remotely decent) novel out of a Markov chain text generator unless you're using tuples so long that you're just regurgitating an existing novel.

Re: Journalism generated by machine is on the rise

#26

Post by atakiel »

biztos wrote: post #9

It's worth asking whether "thousands of articles on company earnings reports each quarter" constitutes journalism.

It's definitely a great question. Even if the articles separately would be considered mere reporting, is the creation of the tool part of the journalistic process?

Another good one might be whether there's an inherent gain in machine-generated news to play by the same rules and constraints as regular human generated news? Is a traditional news article the correct format for a machine generated news, or if some of the constraints of traditional articles are due to human limitations. Basically, which of the rules of traditional articles are due to the creator and which are there to make it easier to consume the information for the reader.

Is there a gain in creating 1 000 articles of company earnings versus condensing or distributing the same (roughly) information in another manner. Mainly, would the reader be able to gain more from news created in another format or medium.

What happens here, is it similar to when newspapers moved from print to web? Initially staying in almost the same format as they had been for hundred years?

When we talk about tools and intermediate forms in relation to journalism and journalistic process, there's also the question of transparency. Is only the end product journalism, or is the end product only a medium for the message? For example, The Correspondent has been a vanguard in this front in traditional journalism, opening up the intermediate forms of the process to the public.

Should we consider for example the aforementioned "thousands of articles on company earnings reports from each quarter" as a intermediate form, rather than the journalistic end product - just a transparent intermediate form? If so, through that lens, is article as a format still the best means for sharing this information?

Re: Journalism generated by machine is on the rise

#27

Post by msla »

jawns wrote: post #12

I'm a former journalist and spent the first 10 years of my career at various magazines and newspapers. 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…

> we're probably decades away from really insightful NLG that offers "why" explanations, as opposed to "what" or "how" descriptions.

For any specialized field, doing this would require something more than the kinds of schooling journalists get. It would also step on a lot of political toes: For example, the current national debt is $X. Why is it that big? Is that number a problem? Say anything concrete regarding either of those questions and you get screeching. Just endless, wordless screeching, like the Pod People in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, only directed into your Letters to the Editor column.

Re: Journalism generated by machine is on the rise

#28

Post by TheGRS »

I was under the impression almost anything that is trigger-based and has some data points is automated these days. Severe weather, sports statistics, poll results, finance numbers. All of that is fairly automate-able. They were talking about this 10 years ago. I'm not sure how to automate much of the rest since the good stories require some kind of context and talking to people on the field.

I just hope we don't lose too many reporters who go to city council meetings and court hearings. Such places need a human present to understand the context of what is happening and can spot corruption as it occurs. The dark side of automation is where people figure out ways to game the system.

Re: Journalism generated by machine is on the rise

#29

Post by vharuck »

dreen wrote: post #11
rubidium wrote: post #8

Just 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?

Interesting! Please tell me more about the can anyone detect the AI comments?

Does humor signal humanity, or does a reference to a popular line from a show famous in nerd culture show lack of creativity?

No matter the answer, I was entertained.

Re: Journalism generated by machine is on the rise

#30

Post by Footkerchief »

rchaud wrote: post #21

> The program can dissect a financial report the moment it appears and spit out an immediate news story that includes the most pertinent facts and figures. As an accountant in a prior life, I can tell you that this approach won't provide anything near "the most pertinent facts". That's because public earnings reports are written specifically to circumvent automated analysis. Wall Street firms have tools in place to s…

The NLG companies aren't parsing the data from financial reports. They're getting clean, structured data (and context) from specialized data providers like Zacks, and its equivalent in other industries: https://automatedinsights.com/customer-stories/associated-pr...
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