Slashdot Mirror
Replacing Sports Bloggers With an Algorithm
tesmar tips a report up at TechCrunch that begins "Here come the robo sports journalists. While people in the media biz worry about content mills like Demand Media and Associated Content spitting out endless SEO-targeted articles written by low-paid Internet writers, at least those articles are still written by humans. We may no longer need the humans, at least for data-driven stories. A startup in North Carolina, StatSheet, today is launching a remarkable network of 345 sports sites, one dedicated to each Division 1 college basketball team in the US. For instance, there is a site for the Michigan State Spartans, North Carolina Tar Heels, and Ohio Buckeyes. Every story on each site was written by a robot, or to put it more precisely, by StatSheet's content algorithms. 'The posts are completely auto-generated,' says founder Robbie Allen. 'The only human involvement is with creating the algorithms that generate the posts.'"
I tried reading the first article on the Tar Heels, and as much as I hate reading anything about the Tar Heels the sentences just don't flow together. It's disjointed and mentally uncomfortable to read. I can't imagine anyone using it as an actual replacement for even semi well-written content.
This post was written by a robot.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
I've read a couple articles and they are no worse than the SEO-targeted content written by freelancers odesk for $2/hr (and english as a second or third language).
Seems as though the "algorithm" is quite elaborate - taking into account odds of winning as well. Lines such as "The [team] was not supposed to win this game, but made it happen" and combined player statistics "Coming off a poorly put together team last year, this year, the [team] looks to have greater talent."
It reminds me of how someone in Junior high would write. Impressive. Similar to MIT's paper generator: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2005/paper.html
PHP + MySQL + Mad Libs for Sports.
... was the article written by a human, or a computer? Can you tell the difference? I remember when robots starting being deployed in factories, that there were concerns about workers sabotaging the robots which were destined to steal their jobs. Will this happen in the sports newsroom?
"The RoboSportReporter is broken again. It looks and smells like someone poured a beer into him."
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Now I just need to find a robot to read all these sports blogs to free up time for things I want to do.
The mascot for Ohio University is the Bobcats
Boom Goes the Dynamite!
Now we need a sports fan algorithm to rid ourselves of all these needless sports fans in the world and replace them with something more worth the resources.
Mission. Fucking. Accomplished.
Don't praise the machine!
This is the DJ 3000. It plays CDs automatically, and it has three distinct varieties of inane chatter:
- Hey hey -- how about that weather out there?
- Woah, that was the caller from hell.
- Well, hot dog -- we have a weiner.
- Those clowns in congress did it again -- what a bunch of clowns.
How does it keep up with the news like that?
for automated theater and restaurant critics.. The human responses will be priceless.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
I read the first article on the first linked site and I was impressed. I wouldn't have known it was generated by a computer. Even knowing that it was computer-generated, I'd still be happy with the quality for this kind of reporting. Very good.
Now let's see if this passes the Turing test of my automated blog reading algorithm...
I am going to guess that there will not be any humans involved in reading the output either.
Can you copyright the output of an algorithm? Seriously, copyright requires a creative element...
Why am I suddenly reminded of this t-shirt? :)
As I suspected it would, the first sentence includes the word "momentum."
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
At least we know that Slashdot isn't generated by robots. A robot wouldn't make the idiotic mistakes that the current human (for want of a better word) editors do. E.g. "one dedicated to each Division 1 college basketball tam in the US." Robots don't suffer from dyslexia, and aren't too lazy to use a spell check.
I read over some of the auto-generated content and the main thing I notice is that sentences don't connect to one another. It's like a chatbot where it says one thing, then another, where the two sentences have no connection; you could reverse their order and they're read just the same.
Now sports editors have something to show novice reporters. "If you can't give me something a whole lot better than this, you're fired".
It's a reminder that standards for every knowledge-based profession are going up every year, driven by the combination of the Internet, globalization, and Moore's Law. And this is just the start of it for journalism.
Part of good sports writing is that it evokes emotions. I read some samples and it's devoid of feeling. It is also completely unable to recount similar events in the past. In fact, no actual events are mentioned beyond statistical data. I want to know about fights during a game or the nearly perfect game that got spoiled.
Let me know when the algorithm can insult rivals.
this looks like prime content for the humans that would fail it, too.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Replace the athletes with algorithms. Just think of the savings.
In the UK the tabloids have been auto-generating content for at least 20 years.
Sure its fine to have a data driven writing algorithm that spits out a decent string of sentences. But who are the low paid joes who key on the raw data?
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
to replace the 'editors' on Slashdot.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I've always been amused by how sports reporters vary the verb used to describe a win. They can't just keep saying "Team A beat Team B" over and over, so they mix it up, based on how wide the score was. For a win with a small margin, they might say "Detroit edged Ottawa", or "The Rangers slid past the Ducks". For a large margin, perhaps "The Coyotes pummeled the Blues". I give extra credit if the verb matches the subject, as in "So-and-so doused the Flames".
I think it would be a lot of fun to write a program for this.
Oh come on Kevin, it is any worse than the pap out out by UNC Journalism students?
At least it will be closer to fair on NC State athletics.
And no, I didn't RTFA in keeping with /. tradition.
That's kind of lame. It's just a one-paragraph summary of the game.
A more promising approach would be to start with a play by play summary. Football play-by-plays look like this:
It's clearly possible to turn that into a sports announcer yelling at you. After all, an engine for that is built into EA Madden NFL. With a sports statistics database, you can throw in stuff like "This is Reeds's biggest gain so far this season".
Somebody has probably already done this.
For hockey, I skip the article and go straight to the boxscore. It has this great innovation: presenting the information in chronological order so you can follow along, rather than describing them in reverse go-ahead order.
If you see a 10 minute misconduct by some skill dude, you might have to read the article to find out whether the guy went ape, or just forget to tie down his jersey in a tug fest of the midgets. This is exactly the information that's not likely to be found in the robospiel. Sometimes I guy goes -3 on the night, but wasn't responsible for any of the goals against if the goalie gases some weak shots, or a line mate keeps trying the same risky drop pass. The only use for the reporter is to supplement what the official statistics misrepresent. Another thing you can't tell from the boxscore is whether a player with four minutes of ice time in the 3rd period was stapled to the bench after too many missed assignments, or went into the dressing room for a skate repair. Stapled to the bench as week before the trade deadline is an important tell.
Now if only we could train the real sports journalists to discard all quotes containing the phrase "win" or "two points" or anything about "effort" or "coming out hard" or "weathering the storm".
An acceptable quote is one I recall from the other day by a guy who hasn't scored much this season about a rare goal: "Actually, I whiffed on that shot. I've had thirty hard shots on net this season and none of them go in. Then I shoot a knuckleball and it goes it, but I'll take it anyway."
That's only mildly interesting, but it's already better than 90% of what gets scribbled.
Sports reporting was invented to kill whatever brain cells survived the drinking the night before. Actually, there's one hockey blog I read with good writing. Unfortunately, it's hampered by the secrecy of player offers rejected, so even a sharp knife can't get to the root of management dysfunction (as much as they like to try).
Of course, the league is constructed to ensure that this will always be true. Fans are for hollering on cue, and not for thinking too much.
We are all Rich Rosen!
I could write better while I'm half-asleep and stoned on cough syrup and vicoden, and I hate basketball.
> the point is to free up humans from doing the boring, silly tasks...
Unfortunately, there is a large population of humans who have no skills beyond what are characterized here as boring, silly tasks, nor much inclination to step up and learn how to be more productive. And regardless of whether they deserve to be employed or not, making them unemployed doesn't help the the population as a whole.
So my applause goes more often to technology that helps people work smarter, not as often to that which outright replaces them.
Am I a butterfly imagining that everybody on Slashdot is a bot discussing a story about bots, or am I a bot posting about people or bots on Slashdot imagining that I'm a bot or a butterfly or something?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
It's a flaw in the economic system that has only come to light in recent years, not anything to do with the value of automation technology.
It's a flaw that came to light during the Industrial Revolution, and in fact hit so hard it spawned Communism as a response. It is also a flaw that's inherent to Capitalism and can't be fixed under it.
Of course, as soon as automation catches up with all tasks - that is, as soon as Artificial Intelligence catches up with Human Intelligence, at least as far as practical matters are concerned - we can simply switch to Socialism, since we have an unlimited supply of effective slave labour doing all the work. Everyone gets their production quota per day and can do what they please with it.
But then again, that won't happen since the haves won't give up their position of superiority, the have-nots won't have the power to take it by force, and the Randroids will run around screaming how people should starve to death on principle.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
It is The Ohio State Buckeyes.
The "point" forecasts on the National Weather Service website are created by a robot off digital - gridded - data. Here A little clunky at times, but there are forecasts for either 5x5km or 2.5x-2.5km grids across the US, more than a million forecast areas updated anywhere from hourly to a few times a day. The human forecasters create the gridded data, so they focus on the data, not the words.
Unfortunately, there is a large population of humans who have no skills beyond what are characterized here as boring, silly tasks, nor much inclination to step up and learn how to be more productive.
And strangely, this description coincides with the characteristics of sport fans I know. They will probably be content with whatever they're fed. No, I am not a fan of sports. Mod me to oblivion.
Are you a grammar Nazi? I'm trying to improve my English; please correct my errors!
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
u mean when it degrades down to mainstream news?
It's not written for you, so they simply do not care. It's written for Google and other search engines to help push whatever their advertisers are selling.
The age of internet search is dead. We need something more intuitive and something decidedly human.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
on the other hand, reminded of a Numb3rs episode wherein a supercomputer was programmed to appear to pass Turing tests.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Yeah, as soon as the AIs can take over all our jobs I'm afraid the general public won't get the profit from it. The divide between poor and rich will become wider not smaller. There will be a few very rich people controlling the machines and billions of poor. Knowing human nature a bit 'they took our jobs!', I think we'll just smash up the machines, lynch those controlling them with pitchforks and torches, and start the nonsense all over. :)
I'd very much like it if we could keep the advantages of technology and have everyone profit from it, but given how things have been going this decennium I don't believe in such star-trek idealism anymore
Good thing for regular news here in the USA that our news isn't data-driven... it's opinion driven, and you need a person to make up an opinion... or do you? I'm pretty sure someone could generate the fox news content just by scanning cnn's articles and negating all of the opinion statements.
stuff |