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Google is funding the creation of software that writes local news stories

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Re: Google is funding the creation of software that writes local news stories

#121

Post by consz »

nogbit wrote: post #114
nickdavidhaynes wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Increased the trading volume? Seriously, you call that value? What are you smoking, that's called pump and dump and is illegal my friend, and if it isn't actually being dumped is downright sleazy car salesman to me. Was that recent study also automated.

Increased trading volume generally just means better price discovery. Why do you think increased trading volume means it's "pump and dump?" When I trade SPY, I increase the trading volume in the underlying S&P 500 components -- am I pumping and dumping then?

Re: Google is funding the creation of software that writes local news stories

#122

Post by [deleted] »

mikeyouse wrote: post #93
iak8god wrote: post #67

Earlier 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…

[deleted]

Re: Google is funding the creation of software that writes local news stories

#123

Post by phreeza »

userbinator wrote: post #109
phreeza wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ha, and the "de-thesaurised" version of that phrase is indeed from this upwork profile!

https://www.upwork.com/o/profiles/users/_~012388b8f7c8ed8aa2...

Re: Google is funding the creation of software that writes local news stories

#124

Post by notahacker »

consz wrote: post #121
nogbit wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Increased the trading volume? Seriously, you call that value? What are you smoking, that's called pump and dump and is illegal my friend, and if it isn't actually being dumped is downright sleazy car salesman to me. Was that recent study also automated.

Increased trading volume generally just means better price discovery. Why do you think increased trading volume means it's "pump and dump?" When I trade SPY, I increase the trading volume in the underlying S&P 500 components -- am I pumping and dumping then?

Increased trading volume driven by bot-written blogspam produced by the company PR department with the express intent of pumping their share price definitely isn't "better price discovery"

Re: Google is funding the creation of software that writes local news stories

#126

Post by _xnmw »

Color me extremely skeptical that current-generation AI can ever write decent quality news articles, even on the "easiest" subjects (i.e. non-emotional topics that may be most amenable to computerization). Sure, an AI might be able to produce the type of contradictory and fundamentally meaningless strings-of-words that characterize Trumpian speech, but even that would lack a unified agenda behind it. Even Trump seems to appeal to some raw masculine #MAGA emotion pretty consistently, but I doubt an AI would be able to do even that. If an AI could produce decent news articles with consistently meaningful statements, I think it would have huge implications for linguistic theory. Currently, we have no way of representing abstract semantic meaning in a computer, for example when I say the word "justice", you all know what I'm talking about because you all have embodied experiences of "justice" (or its opposite) in your personal lives (e.g. bullying). An AI simply never had access to this kind of embodied, experiential input. It only has access to patterns of strings that we humans produce. And so why should we expect an AI to be able to ever produce the same output that we produce when it has access to less input? Sure, one might argue that news articles are not novels, and so require a lower threshold of understanding to produce. I don't think so. We tend to underestimate the embodied nature of even the most basic use of language[0].

[0] See The Embodied Mind by Varela, Thompson, and Rosch.

Re: Google is funding the creation of software that writes local news stories

#127

Post by andai »

dozzie wrote: post #91
bshimmin wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and I can't even point their bad spelling or writing style out There is a certain delicious irony that you managed to contrive such a perfect example of a dangling preposition in the very next sentence after your complaint about a dangling modifier. Skitt's Law in effect once again!

I believe you overlooked the "out" word at the end of the sentence ("[...] I can't even point [it] out"). Or am I mistaken and you meant something else? How should I have written the sentence? Remember that English is not my native language, and having an already established carreer, I don't have many opportunities to learn the grammar more. I'm bound to make errors and not even know about them, because there's nobod…

Not with that attitude!

Re: Google is funding the creation of software that writes local news stories

#128

Post by notahacker »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #118

What about developing a counter-bot that detects and flags algorithmic content? Edit: come to think about it, isn't it what Google should be rather doing?

Yeah. Google has spent years taking the position that extremely thin content generated at a massive scale involving no genuine research or insight is spam that should be penalised. Now it's writing software to do just this.

Re: Google is funding the creation of software that writes local news stories

#129

Post by andai »

Shivetya wrote: post #49
11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #2

I 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 am curious though, will these systems have pen names? A simple name easy enough to recognize as machine written without the need for disclaimer? Could competition be more easily obtained between different companies based on which pen name attracts the most viewers? the one concern I have is someone has to give ths system enough information to create a story and what prevents a fake news machine?

I vote for them all to be called Writey McWriterson.

Re: Google is funding the creation of software that writes local news stories

#130

Post by andai »

jimrandomh wrote: post #17

I would strongly prefer that robo-written news not exist, not appear in the results of any searches I make, and not appear in any feed that I read. It is pollution that makes real information and insight harder to find. Does anyone actually like this stuff?

I expect that a couple years from now, this viewpoint (and most of this thread!) will be seen as really offensive.
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