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In Case You Wondered, a Real Human Wrote This Column

nytimes.com

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Re: In Case You Wondered, a Real Human Wrote This Column

#61

Post by cageface »

TorKlingberg wrote: post #21

I wonder if these automatically generated articles will ever become good enough to be worth reading. Currently, they seem to be just good enough to fool Google, and convince people to click the link. Do any sports fans bookmark and come back to these sites? No matter how good the algorithms get, they are still limited by their input, the statistics. If for example a player scores a very unusual goal, say a bicycle ki…

I think I'd rather see more innovative ways of representing the history of a sporting event graphically instead of trying to replicate the relatively inane blow-by-blow that you currently get from real sports journalists.

Maybe though if this kind of thing continues to improve the humans will have to start doing more serious analysis instead of fluff coverage.

Re: In Case You Wondered, a Real Human Wrote This Column

#62

Post by nl »

arethuza wrote: post #16
dr_ wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not inconceivable that, as AI advances, at some point there with be algorithms that figure out the questions you have posed.

True, it's not inconceivable, but arguably having a system that is an effective investigative journalist is AI-Complete: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI-complete

This is true but like most things has to do with AI has limitations.

In some fields (eg, finance) one can conceive a computer based process that would do a better job than most investigative journalists. It can't deal with missing data, but it can discover inaccuracies, unusual events and suspicious patterns and in some limited fields this is enough.

For example, an AI based process might have been just as good at finding the problems at Enron as conventional journalists were (since it the problems there were mostly uncovered by forensic accounting on their public balance sheets):

But hard information was scarce. "It's almost as if you have to use forensic accountants when you're doing a company story because many companies are using very aggressive accounting techniques that are perfectly legal," Shepard says.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64769-2002Jan...

Re: In Case You Wondered, a Real Human Wrote This Column

#64

Post by Locke1689 »

patio11 wrote: post #35
jellicle wrote: post #19

What this article doesn't tell you is that the human who wrote it works for Narrative Science. For those who don't know, if you see a story in your local paper, and it doesn't involve a car crash, crime, weather, or sports, it was probably placed there by a PR representative. Most of the things you read are not the result of random reporters deciding to cover X or Y, but a paid, concerted effort to place story X or Y…

Exactly right. Quick bit of advice for startups here: Last fall, the Big Ten Network began using Narrative Science for updates of football and basketball games. Those reports helped drive a surge in referrals to the Web site from Google’s search algorithm, which highly ranks new content on popular subjects, Mr. Calderon says. The network’s Web traffic for football games last season was 40 percent higher than in 2009.…

It only makes Google look stupid if it's bad content that gets ranked highly. I've taken several classes with Birbaum and Hammond and the goal isn't to make bad content to fool search engines, it's to make content so good it seems as if a human wrote it. If that's actually the case there's no conflict in Google -- good content gets pushed to the top.

Re: In Case You Wondered, a Real Human Wrote This Column

#65

Post by joshu »

gabrielroth wrote: post #52
jellicle wrote: post #19

What this article doesn't tell you is that the human who wrote it works for Narrative Science. For those who don't know, if you see a story in your local paper, and it doesn't involve a car crash, crime, weather, or sports, it was probably placed there by a PR representative. Most of the things you read are not the result of random reporters deciding to cover X or Y, but a paid, concerted effort to place story X or Y…

I'm not defending the story as a masterpiece of journalism or anything, and I'm sure it was pitched to the reporter by an interested party. But you shouldn't blame 'such clunkers as "To generate story 'angles,' explains Mr. Hammond of Narrative Science...." when Mr. Hammond has already been introduced earlier in the story' on PR agencies. They don't actually write the copy that runs in the NY Times. That particular c…

Markoff once ran an article about MyWeb (yahoo's competitor to delicious) that basically took everything from PR instead of actually doing any research. No mention of competitors, let yahoo take credit for stuff other people invented, etc.

It happens more than you think.

Re: In Case You Wondered, a Real Human Wrote This Column

#66

Post by joshu »

SwellJoe wrote: post #24
jellicle wrote: post #19

What this article doesn't tell you is that the human who wrote it works for Narrative Science. For those who don't know, if you see a story in your local paper, and it doesn't involve a car crash, crime, weather, or sports, it was probably placed there by a PR representative. Most of the things you read are not the result of random reporters deciding to cover X or Y, but a paid, concerted effort to place story X or Y…

The Submarine, by pg: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Ha. That article led to my first correspondence with PG. Scroll down to the bottom for the spoiler.

Re: In Case You Wondered, a Real Human Wrote This Column

#67

Post by patio11 »

Locke1689 wrote: post #64
patio11 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly right. Quick bit of advice for startups here: Last fall, the Big Ten Network began using Narrative Science for updates of football and basketball games. Those reports helped drive a surge in referrals to the Web site from Google’s search algorithm, which highly ranks new content on popular subjects, Mr. Calderon says. The network’s Web traffic for football games last season was 40 percent higher than in 2009.…

It only makes Google look stupid if it's bad content that gets ranked highly. I've taken several classes with Birbaum and Hammond and the goal isn't to make bad content to fool search engines, it's to make content so good it seems as if a human wrote it. If that's actually the case there's no conflict in Google -- good content gets pushed to the top.

it's to make content so good it seems as if a human wrote it. If that's actually the case there's no conflict in Google -- good content gets pushed to the top.

There's an easy way to achieve that: have an actual human write it. This solution does not necessarily win one good will with Google: for one obvious example, most of the content farms were farming manually rather than farming with Markov chains.

I also think "good content" only craters the approach to the bridge of describing both a) what actually ranks on Google and b) what, in an ideal world, Google thinks would rank on Google.

Re: In Case You Wondered, a Real Human Wrote This Column

#68

Post by gabrielroth »

joshu wrote: post #65
gabrielroth wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not defending the story as a masterpiece of journalism or anything, and I'm sure it was pitched to the reporter by an interested party. But you shouldn't blame 'such clunkers as "To generate story 'angles,' explains Mr. Hammond of Narrative Science...." when Mr. Hammond has already been introduced earlier in the story' on PR agencies. They don't actually write the copy that runs in the NY Times. That particular c…

Markoff once ran an article about MyWeb (yahoo's competitor to delicious) that basically took everything from PR instead of actually doing any research. No mention of competitors, let yahoo take credit for stuff other people invented, etc. It happens more than you think.

That doesn't surprise me at all. What would surprise me would be if he copied the actual text provided for him by a PR firm, as the OP suggested Lohr had done.

Like every other daily newspaper, the Times produces some rushed, lazy journalism (as well as some very good journalism). But there are certain lines they don't typically cross, and literally taking dictation from PR is one of them. You might argue that the difference isn't meaningful, and that rules like "Don't just copy out someone else's text" are a fig-leaf to hide bigger problems. I'd have a lot of sympathy for that argument. But if we're going to criticize the Times we should criticize them accurately, for the things they're actually doing wrong, rather than accusing them of doing things they haven't done.

Re: In Case You Wondered, a Real Human Wrote This Column

#69

Post by dredmorbius »

ObXKCD: http://xkcd.com/904/

There are certain topical areas which lend themselves to automated content generation. Sports, financial news, weather, astronomy (astrology isn't worth mentioning), earthquakes and other severe events, machine monitoring.

Domains in which a quantified or measured outcome tied to a specific point in time or event (final score, market close, daily forecast, etc.) occurs. The important data has already been highlighted, all you've got to do is sprinkle some syntactic sugar around it.

Oddly enough, these are areas in which you're already most likely to find existing "AI"-type content generators.

In areas in which you've got to do significant determination of what is salient, the approach isn't nearly as successful.

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