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Replacing Sports Bloggers With an Algorithm

Posted by kdawson on from the something-about-overlords dept.

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.'"

4 of 120 comments (clear)

  1. Close, but still not pratical by kevinNCSU · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Close, but still not pratical by St.Creed · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I can't imagine anyone using it as an actual replacement for even semi well-written content.

      It's a bit uncomfortable to read in spots, but way above the quality of most blogs and nothing you can actually point out as an error. So if they manage not to swamp the sites in ads, and provide good statistics as well, I can't see why they couldn't get a rather large take of the advertising action - large in proportion to the manhours invested in writing articles, that is. It could be very lucrative and if it is - well, say goodbye to a lot of reporters who aren't the primetime writers but just pad out the papers: they're going to be automated away or at best, write the templates for the robowriters.

      --
      Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
  2. Not bad... by Jazz-Masta · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  3. tiny issue by sribe · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Can you copyright the output of an algorithm? Seriously, copyright requires a creative element...