Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Journalism generated by machine is on the rise

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 60 posts

Re: Journalism generated by machine is on the rise

#41

Post by freehunter »

jon-wood wrote: post #34
freehunter wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The core of it is a decision tree tied to a pretty in-depth database that either knows everything about the city or seeks to learn everything about the city. The system reads an event on the calendar that says "Van Halen is playing at American Brew Pub on February 12th at 7pm" and starts running running through the decision tree pulling information out of the database to fill in the blanks on the phrases it's picked.…

The concept seems pretty solid, but reading the output I feel like this is bordering on unethical. Maybe this is just a bad example, but it seems you’ve gone past programmatically giving people information, and into giving the impression you’re actually endorsing things. Unless you actually add metadata to the artist saying you love them, or rate the venue to indicate it’s good for live music, you’ve got no way of go…

This is a very simplified example written by human hands just for this post (not machine written). The database is immense and has far more fields than you might imagine. It takes into account how many clicks content with Van Halen has had in the past and how many clicks content with American Brewpub has had etc to figure out how likely this article is to resonate with our audience, plus how many human-written articles have been published about these subjects and sentiment analysis to figure out if our articles were positive or neutral (we don't write negative articles, if we don't like a business/event we just don't talk about it), which impacts how the machine-generated article is phrased or even if it gets written at all.

We have about 90 events on our calendar per city in any given month, and this AI writes about three or four articles per city per week even though it's running constantly. It's pretty selective and very rarely writes something that our two human writers wouldn't have mentioned otherwise. Our personal preferences and those of our audience are certainly taken into account.

Re: Journalism generated by machine is on the rise

#42

Post by fdggdfsvscvsd »

thfuran wrote: post #25
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.

Not Markov chain, but I have been wondering about Dwarf Fortress. Some stories of Dwarf Fortress sound quite interesting. So I wonder if an automated writeup of an automated Dwarf Fortress game could yield something worthwhile.

Re: Journalism generated by machine is on the rise

#43

Post by opportune »

If you've ever actually read these financial articles you would know that they are basically hot garbage. Usually someone just wrote a template that scrapes a bunch of numbers out of a financial report and puts them in predetermined places. It has no utility beyond reading the financial report itself aside from being marginally more accessible.

Re: Journalism generated by machine is on the rise

#44

Post by summm »

So lots of effort is spent to collect data, make it machine readable data, distill into a selected set of information (still machine readable?) and then... it is obfuscated again by converting it back into natural language which must be parsed again by humans? What a waste! Couldn't that last step be skipped or put under the user's control? Say, my personal assistant/agent/filter/script could ingest the actual data and act on it on my behalf? Maybe tell me only what is actually relevant for me. Such that I don't have to wade through heaps of fluffy bs all the time.

Re: Journalism generated by machine is on the rise

#45

Post by neffy »

msla wrote: post #27
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 eith…

To be fair to the journalists, those are actually open research questions.

Re: Journalism generated by machine is on the rise

#46

Post by ChuckMcM »

Isn't the elephant in the room here that the stories that can be auto-generated don't have a creative component? They are just reporting some factual event or data. That is exactly analogous to robots that can assemble something on a factory line because all of the steps can be pre-programmed.

"Real" journalists are the ones that go through various facts and other tidbits and realize that there is a story that is deeper than just the facts. They research and tell that story so that the reader can understand it and appreciate why it is important or insightful. That is something that a 'robo-journalist' won't be able to do for a while.

For example, you can easily write a script to publish descriptions of the local high school football game every Friday night. But a robot doing that won't recognize when one of the team's members is exceptional, or how a team has changed its tactics to increase its ability to win games, or the impact of new facilities have had on the teams performance. Connecting those dots are still outside the realm of possible for these things.

Re: Journalism generated by machine is on the rise

#47

Post by marcosdumay »

TheGRS wrote: post #28

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…

> Such places need a human present to understand the context of what is happening and can spot corruption as it occurs.

We have some interesting AI projects going for spotting corruption as it occurs here at Brazil, both government backed and fully private ones.

Re: Journalism generated by machine is on the rise

#49

Post by claudiawerner »

apocalypstyx wrote: post #14
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?

The thing of it is I wonder if we, really, have a distinction.[b] 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…

>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.'

I would go in exactly the opposite direction. AI does have deep-seated beliefs because the programmers who input the training data and label it have deep-seated beliefs, as does the culture the content is drawn from. I'd say it's much more likely that AI is more human than philosophically ignorant scientists obsessed with mechanistic empiricist dogma would let on than it is that humans are just 'statistical machines'.

For instance, AI identifying some women as men (and some men as women) show that it's just as human as the rest of us - it was trained on data based on squarely modernist gender appearances.

This is a good article that touches on the issue: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3078224

Re: Journalism generated by machine is on the rise

#50

Post by MisterOctober »

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…

^ can confirm the above assertion about in-report tables being created as vector graphics to stymie scraping efforts
Post reply on HN