Could a Computer Write This Story?

An anonymous reader tips an article at CNN about the development of technology that automates the process of writing news articles. It started with simple sports reporting, but now at least one company is setting its sights on more complicated articles. Quoting: "Narrative Science then began branching out into finance and other topics that are driven heavily by data. Soon, Hammond says, large companies came looking for help sorting huge amounts of data themselves. 'I think the place where this technology is absolutely essential is the area that's loosely referred to as big data,' Hammond said. 'So almost every company in the world has decided at one point that in order to do a really good job, they need to meter and monitor everything.' ... Meanwhile, Hammond says Narrative Science is looking to eventually expand into long form news stories. That's an idea that's unsettling to some journalism experts."

Comments

A better question

[Anonymous Coward]

Could a Computer Write Better Stories on Slashdot?

YES.

Re:A better question

[million_monkeys]

Could a Computer Write Better Stories on Slashdot?

Slashdot summaries would be fairly well suited to being done by computer. They are usually taken from existing articles available on the web. They follow a straightforward format that is largely a quote/summary of the article. Occasionally they provide links to previous stories on the same topic. Computers can already do those things. You could even have an algorithm to put in random typos. I'm not sure how successful a computer would be at generating the tag lines like "from the kicking-newspaper-writers-when-they're-down dept.", but the rest seems doable. If slashdot were run by a bunch of geeks with the desire to do so, the story process could probably be automated, including the process of finding and rating interesting stories by by scanning various sites.

How news is written

[Dr. Tom]

"${subject} ${verb} ${object}," said a source inside the ${CurrentPresident} ${administration} who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press.

Easy!

[mustafap]

void main (void) {
    printf("First Post!\n");
}

Already Been Done

[Kamel Jockey]

SciGen was out in 2005.

You mean they aren't already?

[Snaller]

Could have fooled me.

Newspeak makes it easier for computers to write...

[mrroot]

Automated story writing will be easier once the next updated version of the newspeak dictionary is released. Unfortunately I am a doubleplusungood newspeaker, but at least computer written stories will help me avoid crimethink.