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How a robot wrote for Engadget
John McCarthy, the late computer scientist who first coined the term "artificial intelligence," famously said: "As soon as it works, no one calls it AI any more." What was once cutting-edge AI is now considered standard behavior for computers. As I write this, my computer is continuously performing millions of tasks, caching files, managing RAM and balancing CPU loads. The algorithms behind many of these operations would have been considered AI years ago. Now it's just software. Last year, I looked into how well neural networks -- programs that behave like a scaled-down version of your brain's neurons -- are able to write. My plan was to create a bot that could write articles for Engadget. As I discovered, we're not yet at the point in which such applications can think and write like humans, but they can do a reasonable job of writing readable sentences. As I noted at the time, some companies are using less "advanced" methods to produce content automatically. One such company is Automated Insights, whose tools are used by a number of companies to autogenerate reports, and also by the Associated Press to write articles about sports and finance. I've been using one of Automated Insights' products, Wordsmith, trying again to make a computer write like Engadget. It's easy to argue that Wordsmith isn't AI. It doesn't use machine learning and neural networks, but it does work. And thanks to that fact, I've been much more successful in my mission to automate the art of the tech blog.
AP now automates news for most minor league baseball games
The Associated Press announced plans to automate financial stories back in 2014, and last year the media outlet started doing the same for college sports. Expanding its partnership with Automated Insights, the AP will now generate coverage for nearly every minor league baseball team. This is an expansion of existing bot-powered sports writing as it will now handle game storylines for 142 teams in 13 leagues. To put it another way, every Triple-A, Double-A and Single-A team is included with only Rookie Leagues left out.
Robotic news writers are faster, but not necessarily better
Robotic news editors promise to save the trouble of picking and writing news stories (and might put people like me out of work), but are they really ready to replace human writers? Yes and no, if you ask NPR. The outlet held a showdown between Automated Insights' WordSmith news generator and a seasoned reporter to see which of the two could not only finish an earnings story the quickest, but produce something you'd want to read. The results? WordSmith was much faster, producing its piece in two minutes versus seven, but the writing was more than a little stiff -- it lacked the colorful expressions that made NPR's version easy to digest. With that said, newsies might not want to relax just yet. It's technically possible for software to adapt to a given style, so flesh-and-bone writers may still want to update their resumés... y'know, just in case. [Image credit: Justin Cook, NPR]
