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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.
