Slashdot Mirror
The Rise of Machine-Written Journalism
Hugh Pickens writes "Peter Kirwan has an interesting article in Wired UK on the emergence of software that automates the collection, evaluation, and even reporting of news events. Thomson Reuters, the world's largest news agency, has started moving down this path, courtesy of an intriguing product with the nondescript name NewsScope, a machine-readable news service designed for financial institutions that make their money from automated, event-driven trading. The latest iteration of NewsScope 'scans and automatically extracts critical pieces of information' from US corporate press releases, eliminating the 'manual processes' that have traditionally kept so many financial journalists in gainful employment. At Northwestern University, a group of computer science and journalism students have developed a program called Stats Monkey that uses statistical data to generate news reports on baseball games. Stats Monkey identifies the players who change the course of games, alongside specific turning points in the action. The rest of the process involves on-the-fly assembly of templated 'narrative arcs' to describe the action in a format recognizable as a news story. 'No doubt Kurt Cagle, editor of XMLToday.org, was engaging in a bit of provocation when he recently suggested that an intelligent agent might win a Pulitzer Prize by 2030,' writes Kirwin. 'Of course, it won't be the software that takes home the prize: it'll be the programmers who wrote the code in the first place, something that Joseph Pultizer could never have anticipated.'"
Another "machines will take my job" story. This is as old as technology itself.
As with all other technologies, the future will be vastly different than what we envision.
If that's a demonstration I feel sorry for the people who think we'll get anywhere by 2030.
Well-written prose is far from formulaic. While financial institutions and baseball enthusiasts may happily forego a penetrating understanding of a situations meaning and emotions the literate will not.
A great fear of mine is that a machine will decide what I should or should not know about. Another is that a machine like this could be tampered with by any human being to make the same decision.
Big Brother SkyNet is watching you, and telling you all you need to know.
"Be prepared, son. That's my motto. Be prepared." --Joe Hallenbeck
This is nothing more than extracting stats and then placing them in pre-generated sentences.
In sports, this is okay. Except when something interesting happens like someone head-butting another player.
Anyone want to place a bet on how long before companies are accused of "gaming" the financial reporting system with their press releases?
Spam is where it's at. Spam is where we are going to see strong artificial intelligence emerge, both defensively and offensively. Spam already represents some of the most cutting-edge algorithms in machine learning today. Think about it. In the undefined when of the future: you will have AI that stops spam. Spam will be AI that attempts to get through your filters. The only spam your AI will let through is spam you are genuinely interested in or that befriends you: it provides something of value. At the base level however it does have its purpose: get you to buy something. This is the motivation of why machine intelligence will emerge in spam first: somebody, somewhere will be making money. Would you like to buy this new computer, it is well built and will enhance the effectiveness of your communication with your network of contacts? Also, if you do I will cover the shipping myself.
Shh.
I'm pretty convinced most corporate press releases are machine-generated anyway, so it should be a matter of reverse-compiling them back into plain English and including that as part of a story.
ABC Co. CEO to PressBot: "The market totally screwed us. The building is collapsing because we can't afford maintenance. We have to lay everyone off and we'll be out of business in three months. We can't afford exterminators so weasels are chewing my genitalia into mush."
PressBot's press release: "The company continues to leverage circular market forces to tighten its bottom line, particularly in the area of vertical integration. Resources are plentiful enough, however, that all employees will be allowed to pursue innovative new ideas in an open, creative setting, with plenty of personal time. The CEO is actively involved in the belt-tightening process and has taken steps to ensure that only underutilized corporate assets will be liquidated."
A human or a webbot could probably gather equally-useful information out of it.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
We've completed the circle - various "automated systems" have been blamed for various market failures in recent years, as companies and small traders have used algorithms on computers to "keep up with the speed of the market". Of course, the actual failure was almost always in the design, such as allowing a computer to make blind decisions with large amounts of money faster than you could keep track of.
But here, we have a stronger case for a machine-driven market failure - automated news algorithms. Misunderstanding generated at the speed of the market. I've worked on AI professionally in games, studied it in the contexts of linguistics, nervous system simulation, and such - AI even in its most exaggerated modern state is not going to even know how to figure out how to extract a good quote with human guidance, much less report on a news release. If you thought computer generated music was entertainingly bad - wait until you see some of the awful things produced by automated news misunderstandings... random context switches mixed with "neutral language" bits, it'll be like Fox news switched its agenda to Cthulu-level madness of confusion rather than the usual rage agenda.
And since the market makes its decisions on the basis of news, rumors, and insider trading - and people get the three confused as they hear them, mixing this into the information stream seems a virtual guarantee of another market crash.
That's what I call another serious negative externality for the news business taking the cheaper road to reporting business news.
Ryan Fenton
Anyone want to place a bet on how long before companies are accused of "gaming" the financial reporting system with their press releases?
As opposed to 'gaming' the media with their press releases? Isn't that what a PR person is supposed to to, create press releases that cast the company in a favorable light?
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
'scans and automatically extracts critical pieces of information' from US corporate press releases, eliminating the 'manual processes' that have traditionally kept so many financial journalists in gainful employment.
That, I must admit, is an excruciatingly lame definition of 'journalism'.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Neither an H1B job nor a job sent overseas represents a job "lost". A person of equal moral value is doing the job before and after. To say "it's evil that a job has moved from a good man of my country to a filthy foreign devil" is simple racism, nothing more.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
It's not racism at all. It's nationalism.
And as far as the common man is concerned, he sees his friends out of work and jobs going overseas. He doesn't understand the complexities involved or that his friends probably can't even DO the job that's being sent there... He just sees a 'lost job'.
But you've gotten away from the point: This is about news reporting and how hard it is to report news other than the usual drivel that they report.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM