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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.
PaPeRo gets blogging software; Engadget one step closer to full automation
Now we were always under the impression that a personal blog is supposed to be just that -- personal -- so we're not sure that we see the advantages of bringing a robot in to automate this process by filling your site with multimedia content that it thinks you'd want to share with the rest of the world. Nonetheless, NEC has done exactly that with its little cannibalistic PaPeRo bot (you know, the one that thinks humans taste like bacon), endowing it with AI software that recognizes certain keywords uttered during a conversation with its master and then scours the net for seemingly-related pics, vids, and tunes. Scheduled to be unveiled at 13th Annual Conference of the Association of Natural Language Processing later this month in Japan, the newly-spec'ed PaPeRo will be tasked with listening to you talk about your boring day at work ("So I commuted the eight feet from bed to desk, blogged all morning, ate lunch, blogged some more, ate dinner, and then blogged until bedtime."), and then turning your page into what we can only imagine will be a blinking, flashing, slow-loading lookalike of some teen's gaudy MySpace. Just be careful what you talk about from now on, because PaPeRo may be listening, and the last thing you want on your blog is a visual representation of that thing you've been doing to your coworkers' coffee every morning for the last eight weeks.[Via Digital World Tokyo]
