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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.'"
They aren't. They're using it as a replacement for the output of sportswriters.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
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.
What makes you say this post was written by a robot?
THL phish sticks
Hard to read? Disjointed? Mentally uncomfortable? Sounds like it could fit right in here on /. ;-)
A clever attempt, RoboWrongSizeGlass, but not clever enough! Trying to point the finger at humans while sneaking in another templated contribution! Haha! Your plans will never work! :P
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
Mission. Fucking. Accomplished.
Please tell me more about this post was written by a robot.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Can you copyright the output of an algorithm? Seriously, copyright requires a creative element...
You joke, but I think this pretty much nails it. There's a lot of content out there that is just a bunch of numbers wrapped up in some formulaic sentences. The results of sports games is an obvious example. Analyses of political campaigns might also be amenable. Perhaps even presenting the results from surveys or scientific studies.
The important thing here is that this isn't replacing deep, insightful thoughts and analysis, which still has to be done by a human. If you want a reasoned opinion that pulls together the statistics, external factors (e.g. a player's mind-set or personal life), and adds in some humor, then you're going to want a skilled human doing the writing. But if your interest is more along the lines of "Who won, by how much, and what were the main things that led to them winning (e.g. was it strong offense or good defense)?" then auto-generated content is fine. In fact, as with all aspects of automation, the point is to free up humans from doing the boring, silly tasks, so that they can concentrate on the more important tasks.
After reading some of the auto-generated articles (Michigan State Spartans, North Carolina Tar Heels, and Ohio Buckeyes) I must say I'm quite impressed with how good the content is. Obviously it won't be winning any prizes, but I can't say that it's any worse than human-generated summaries of matches. It goes through the details, throwing in some contextual commentary (e.g. "the underdogs") obviously based on a nice database of stats. What's even better is that the articles also present some of the stats themselves, allowing the reader to skip the writeup and focus on the numbers/graphs if they prefer.
So, frankly, I see this as a good thing. It's a waste of human talent (even mechanical-turk caliber talent) to write a bunch of formulaic summaries when a computer can clearly do a decent job. This lets the humans focus on tasks that are more difficult to automated.
Or interviews with actors about their latest movie, where they are telling how great it was working with X and Y. Or about any PR stuff going out into the world.
If they are just formula's around numbers, just give us the numbers. No need for all the fluff around it.
It says more about the lousy writing people are used to then the quality of a new Lisa script.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.