Don't most reporters start out with obscure/niche stories so they can hone their writing styles on relatively "unimportant" or filler pieces? If machines do all of that work, how do reporters develop the experience to be able to write an organized, in-depth important story?
Google is funding the creation of software that writes local news stories
51–60 of 140 posts
Re: Google is funding the creation of software that writes local news stories
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't really see what this has to do with fake news. Traditionally produced news stories can be fake, and algorithmically generated stories can be fake (when fed bad data). The only solution to take news is news organisations that people can trust. Historically, local news organisations have always been the most trusted, but their income has been absolutely decimated in the last decade or so. This feels like a desp…
This decreases the barrier to entry. Sometimes that's all it takes to encourage the wrong things. The overall system is failing because it cannot adapt to the new internet age. Hopefully something changes and we get reliable news.
Ability to automate creation of news = ability to automate creation of propaganda = ability to automate censorship of news.
Re: Google is funding the creation of software that writes local news stories
#53I 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 feel differently. I think there's a place for information that people would like to read as prose but the economics don't make sense to pay someone to write it. I feel like this is an advance that's increasing the wealth of the world because we're going to get more text while spending fewer man-hours on it. And it's just going to get better over time. It's obvious now when something was written by a bot, but I doub…
> Giving such text a human name as the author is indefensible.
Why is it indefensible in your opinion? I think it is only fair that if I have a job of writing some output based on some inputs, and I define a process to do that that can be automated, the end product is still my labor, and I can sign it.
Re: Google is funding the creation of software that writes local news stories
#54I 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'd guess that about a third to half of the "financial news" articles I see on finance.google.com are generated from some sort of template, with a script filling in the details. I'd love to see Google identify and remove these sites from their search results (and any sites that link to them), but I think they either don't think it's a high priority or they don't know how to solve the problem.
What will be creepy is if the auto-generated story algorithms get good enough that you can't tell what's written by a human and what isn't, there will no longer a human filter between what some powerful institution wants a news article to say and what makes it into print. Most journalists have a sense of journalistic ethics or at least a reputation to defend; an algorithm has neither of those.
Re: Google is funding the creation of software that writes local news stories
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is definitely machine generated. http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/05/20/406484294/an-np...
That's a great example, because I much prefer the robot version of the Denny article to the human created version.
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 generated version either. The story was not worth writing or publishing or reading at all because nobody cares including the author (which is why a machine can write it).
Re: Google is funding the creation of software that writes local news stories
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure. There was a series of anti-war protests at a mall around Albany NY in the run up to the second gulf war. I had been covering the story on a regular basis, but it had gotten very little attention because the media had decided that anti-war protests were not newsworthy. Well, finally at one of these protests they arrest a judge and that is newsworthy. People start looking for names and places and these match the…
So you didn't write about a future event
They said they covered a news story before "it" happened.
If we want to take a considerate interpretation- they wrote about the "news" before the "real news" decided it was "news".
Re: Google is funding the creation of software that writes local news stories
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is definitely machine generated. http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/05/20/406484294/an-np...
That's a great example, because I much prefer the robot version of the Denny article to the human created version.
They both had their advantages. The human one wasted words on being cutesy but had the Las Vegas analysis.
Re: Google is funding the creation of software that writes local news stories
#58Very 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 read Apple news exclusively. It's pretty awesome and hopefully will soon support micropayments.
Re: Google is funding the creation of software that writes local news stories
#59I 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…
From the article (mistakes highlighted):
> Human news writers regularly point out that AIs tend to lack nuance and a _flare_ for language in the stories they churn out. That’s probably a _fare_ criticism [...]
Maybe they used speech-to-text transcription for this, given that the mistakes are homophones? It seems very unlikely that either a human typing this, or a computerized system would make these mistakes (if it learns word associations from a corpus).
PS: the article also claims to be human generated:
> This story was not generated by an AI, but to be fair, I haven’t had my coffee yet.
EDIT: Oops, I might have misunderstood which article you were referring to, since the reference was not placed next to "this".
Re: Google is funding the creation of software that writes local news stories
#60The irony is that the I how radio news got its start. Ronald Reagan became an actor after being a "sports announcer" -- what he really did was read the ticker tape of a game in progress ("smith at plate. first ball strike no swing. Second ball base hit") and create an exciting story to go with it "And smith steps up to the plate. He flexes his muscles, kicks the ground and takes his stance. He passes on the first ball....strike! Here's the next pitch...he swings...solid towards third base. Is it a foul? NO!! AND HE'S SAFE ON FIRST BASE!!!"
Really most "news" articles are only a couple of paragraphs long anyway and could be expanded or contracted on the spot to match the interest of the reader.