Without machines acquiring true understanding of what is happening, this is going nowhere. I applaud their effort but it is misguided.
Google is funding the creation of software that writes local news stories
61–70 of 140 posts
Re: Google is funding the creation of software that writes local news stories
#62I 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 l…
FWIW, I absolutely believe that a human would make those kinds of typos while typing... I myself didn't realize "flair for criticism" was spelled like that (and the top hit searching on Google for that, without quotes, is actually a book title using the other spelling, though it may very well have been a purposeful pun...). It would be one thing if those weren't themselves "correctly spelled words" (and so a text editor might catch it), but both "flare" and "fare" could easily slip by unnoticed. I will often even make much more interesting typos, where the word just "sounds sort of like the other word but no one would ever confuse the two", as I tend to speak to myself in my head as I type (and as I read) and I swear all language in my brain is at some point represented as audio... I'm not coming up with any examples right now, but trust me that when they come up they are incredibly strange.
Re: Google is funding the creation of software that writes local news stories
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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.
Re: Google is funding the creation of software that writes local news stories
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 l…
FWIW, I absolutely believe that a human would make those kinds of typos while typing... I myself didn't realize "flair for criticism" was spelled like that (and the top hit searching on Google for that, without quotes, is actually a book title using the other spelling, though it may very well have been a purposeful pun...). It would be one thing if those weren't themselves "correctly spelled words" (and so a text edi…
Only slightly tangential, have you come across the term eggcorn[1] before?
I always get a chuckle out of thinking about it.
1. In linguistics, an eggcorn is an idiosyncratic substitution of a word or phrase for a word or words that sound similar or identical in the speaker's dialect (sometimes called oronyms). The new phrase introduces a meaning that is different from the original but plausible in the same context, such as "old-timers' disease" for "Alzheimer's disease". - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggcorn
Re: Google is funding the creation of software that writes local news stories
#65The question is: How are those news items going to be named: Robo news?
Or maybe "fake news", until 'elevated' by Google curators?
Maybe Microsoft's Ai bot experiment might offer a cautionary tale.
Re: Google is funding the creation of software that writes local news stories
#66I 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've also noticed this on financial/stock news articles. I've seen a few of them use full 4-word names for corporations ("The Coca-Cola Company") dozens of times in one article, and multiple times per sentence.
That's where companies like Arria https://www.arria.com/ doing natural language generation step in so you can't tell the difference if it's machine or human generated. Well that's the promise.
Re: Google is funding the creation of software that writes local news stories
#67I 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…
That "author" published 87 such articles on July 7 2017[0], and a total of over 8,500 so far this year[1].
Re: Google is funding the creation of software that writes local news stories
#68I 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/
The whole thing is full of rehashed phrases:
(link to google for "A deeper exploration of the setup is sure to yield a clear picture"):
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22A+deeper+exploration+of+t...
Craziness. Auto-generated soup to farm SEO?
Re: Google is funding the creation of software that writes local news stories
#69The question is: How are those news items going to be named: Robo news? Or maybe "fake news", until 'elevated' by Google curators? Maybe Microsoft's Ai bot experiment might offer a cautionary tale.
It's not actually Google doing it, they're just funding it. Here's a better article https://www.recode.net/2017/7/7/15937436/google-news-media-r...
Re: Google is funding the creation of software that writes local news stories
#70Very 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.
What makes you believe that Google will destroy this deceptive content?