What would those article-writing robots use as their primary source of information?
If they write local news, will they use social media as their datasource? Other sources?
Google is funding the creation of software that writes local news stories
101–110 of 140 posts
Re: Google is funding the creation of software that writes local news stories
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your sentence was unidiomatic to this native English speaker - "point" and "out" always belong together in a construct like that. My offer was a joke, but never mind.
> Your sentence was unidiomatic to this native English speaker [emphasis mine] Fair enough, but I obviously picked up this manner somewhere, and from what I remember, it was long before internet got crowded by people from all over the world, so I think it was from some other native English speakers. > My offer was a joke, but never mind. Your joke went over my head so high that I recoiled from the superiority vibe I…
I think we probably win the award for the most worthless exchange on HackerNews today. Well done us!
Re: Google is funding the creation of software that writes local news stories
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
That "author" published 87 such articles on July 7 2017[0], and a total of over 8,500 so far this year[1]. [0] https://www.nystocknews.com/author/mack-tyler/page/9/ [1] https://www.nystocknews.com/author/mack-tyler/page/854/
As far as I can tell; None of the authors are real people, the website is registered behind a anonymization service, there is no company registered with their name, the address of their office doesn't exist, the phone number connects to a 'subscriber not in service'... If you look at their Google Ad ID, it was used in the past on the now defunct "TheSportsTruth.com" -- which looks like it primarily existed to shuffle…
How did you find out that stuff of the google ad id? Especially associating it with past websites.
Re: Google is funding the creation of software that writes local news stories
#104Very Relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2Ut5GqQ1f4 Google will one day be the arbitrators of news. If it doesn't fit in their world view, whether it's true or not. Will be removed from the results. I think now is the time to setup a different model and remove their monopoly. Internet freedoms are at stake here. Do no evil? Yeah right.
I disagree. There has always been a definable difference between fact and fiction. Both have a place on the net but where fiction masquerades as fact with the intent to decieve, we have a duty to use all the tools at our disposal to destroy that ruse and choose more factual sources on which to base our decisions. I for one welcome our new news overlords.
This is a naive viewpoint I see pop up a lot. People pushing "fiction" think it's a "fact" and there's no full-proof way to convince them otherwise or even perfectly distinguish the two. People will tell you that it's a fact that vaccines cause autism or Iraq has WMDs or America is a white supremacist country. In reality, "facts" are linguistic simplifications of reality that inherently omit information and the distinction of "fact" from "fiction" is itself a simplistic way to attempt to describe the accuracy of a statement. On a personal note, the people most convinced that they are pushing facts are the ones I'm most skeptical of.
Re: Google is funding the creation of software that writes local news stories
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
For me, neither was worth reading and since the machine generated version was shorter it was less not worth reading than the longer one...but the longer one contained the logical possibility of being worth reading whereas the machine written one was as good as it could possibly be. Or to put it another way, while it was not worth the human effort to write the story, it wasn't worth the CPU cycles to write the machine…
> The story was not worth writing or publishing or reading Of course, these are the wrong metrics. The correct metrics are: ad impressions vs. cost to generate content.
In that vein and thinking about click-bots, I'd favor revenue over ad impressions.
Re: Google is funding the creation of software that writes local news stories
#106Random thoughts: * Facts delivered with arbitrary fluff words is pointless even when written by a human - it obfuscates the real purpose which is the data * Companies pay humans to deliver articles in most cases and the bias of the writer or the institution that paid for it shines through. I cannot find a real difference between intentional angling by payment or by algorithm * When the day arises where computers coul…
True but think about this though, Hunter S. Thompson started out as a sports writer. Sports is a big area where this is used currently. Gonzo journalism wouldn't have even been a thing if it was all robo-writing at the time.
I think it comes down to flavor/style. Even in food for instance, yes a robot can make a meal but a chef can make a dish (maybe later reproduced by robots but still). There will always be a need for style, which is really hard to automate.
Re: Google is funding the creation of software that writes local news stories
#107Somewhat ironic as Google has been fighting link spammers that use autogenerated content for years. Software like this is popular in that space: https://wordai.com
Re: Google is funding the creation of software that writes local news stories
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
As far as I can tell; None of the authors are real people, the website is registered behind a anonymization service, there is no company registered with their name, the address of their office doesn't exist, the phone number connects to a 'subscriber not in service'... If you look at their Google Ad ID, it was used in the past on the now defunct "TheSportsTruth.com" -- which looks like it primarily existed to shuffle…
How did you find out that stuff of the google ad id? Especially associating it with past websites.
In the source of every page with Google ads, there's a "Publisher ID" which is a unique identifier for the account. In the case of NYStockNews.com, it shows up as:
> google_ad_client: "ca-pub-6009540024781990"
From there, there are specialty services that keep track over time, otherwise, you can just search for the trailing digits on Google.
When doing so for "6009540024781990", a few sites come up, GDPInsider.com - Another stock bot-written site, and then a dead link with a Google Cache:
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Ccudn6...
Using various other tools, you can see the domain registration information over time or ID which servers hosted it, or just find out who was linking to a domain earliest. Reddit is a great site for the latter. Often times, when a 'marketer' sets up a site like these, they immediately run to social media to try and promote it. If you can find the first time it's linked publicly, you can often find out who posted it.
That last part is actually one of the ways they tied Ross Ulbricht to The Silk Road -- They found the first public mention of The Silk Road online (The post: https://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/1386099...) which was written by 'Altoid' and directed users to a Wordpress page that had been set up a few days earlier. They then found a series of posts on BitcoinTalk by 'Altoid' looking for an IT Pro in the Bitcoin community with instructions to email Ross.Ulbricht@gmail.com if they were interested in a job... He was doing deeply illegal stuff and couldn't be bothered to mask his ID, imagine how easy it is to find rando affiliate marketers.
Re: Google is funding the creation of software that writes local news stories
#109I ran across this article while researching a stock and as I read, I kept thinking, "This was not written by a person. This was written by software." [0] I checked the attribution, and there is a person's name on it. Sure, any hack can write and publish and this is probably just another example. But the odd style doesn't even strike me as 'writing the way I think' or writing and publishing quickly without editing. Fo…
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22When+you+combine+the+technical+... Seems to be at least some sort of copy and paste going on... edit: This is so bizarre, one of the sites has a section with editor "bios" but they read like some sort of very poor odesk/fiverr profiles, wouldn't be surprised if thats what they are... https://nystocknews.com/our-staff/
This line from those "bios" caught my attention:
I’d affection to help you with your written work, altering and substance needs!
...because I mentally "autocorrected" the latter half to "and mind-altering substance needs"... Looks like they used a "thesauriser" on it. Not hard to see love->affection, editing->altering, and content->substance.
Of course, if you are under the influence of a mind-altering substance, you would probably not notice anything wrong with that page. ...and unfortunately, so would many people who aren't.
Re: Google is funding the creation of software that writes local news stories
#110I ran across this article while researching a stock and as I read, I kept thinking, "This was not written by a person. This was written by software." [0] I checked the attribution, and there is a person's name on it. Sure, any hack can write and publish and this is probably just another example. But the odd style doesn't even strike me as 'writing the way I think' or writing and publishing quickly without editing. Fo…
I work for Automated Insights, a company that makes a SaaS platform very similar to what's in the article. Here's an example "in the wild" of the content we produce - http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/business/article158774809... Many of your criticisms are totally valid. Lots of the phrasing is awkward - even the lede is really bad ("Tesla, Inc. (TSLA) has been having a set of eventful trading activity"...wat). And…
I don't understand what value the prose provides over spending the same amount of effort producing clear, easy to read infographics.
Instead of producing awkward and difficult-to-read English sentences, why not use the same content generator to produce completely accurate and easier to read dynamic data visualizations?