8 ms·

Google is funding the creation of software that writes local news stories

189 points by tokyoSurfer 9y ago

calafrax 9y ago
I was just thinking that journalism needed less on the ground reporting and critical thought. More mindless aggregation and repeating of existing data custom tailored to the views of the people reading it is really whats missing.
11thEarlOfMar 9y ago
I ran across this article while researching a stock and as I read, I kept thinking, "This was not written by a person. This was written by software." [0] I checked the attribution, and there is a person's name on it. Sure, any hack can write and publish and this is probably just another example. But the odd style doesn't even strike me as 'writing the way I think' or writing and publishing quickly without editing. For example, from the 2nd paragraph, "The corresponding low also paints a picture and suggests that the low is nothing but a 97.89% since 11/14/16." I can't gather any meaning from that statement, yet it has oddly specific details. I am not glad to see this trend and not glad that Google is embarking on this path. I suppose it is inevitable, but unless there is expertise built into this AI that can extract meaning from data on my behalf and present it in a way that is more insightful and interesting than I am, it will become yet another source of chaff I'll have to filter. Can we at least, please, flag AI generated prose as such? [0] https://www.nystocknews.com/2017/07/05/tesla-inc-tsla-showcases-what-it-has-to-offer-via-the-technical-chart/ https://www.nystocknews.com/2017/07/05/tesla-inc-tsla-showca...
- revmoo 9y ago
  Those articles are all over the web on all sorts of throwaway made-up sites. They're absolutely computer generated. They make for really annoying search engine spam.
- semperdark 9y ago
  I've also noticed this on financial/stock news articles. I've seen a few of them use full 4-word names for corporations ("The Coca-Cola Company") dozens of times in one article, and multiple times per sentence.
  - dom0 9y ago
    These are indeed frequently generated automatically.
  - fjdlwlv 9y ago
    Yes, finance and sports and weather and other metrics reporting is already highly automated.
    - lspress 9y ago
      Automated Insights https://automatedinsights.com https://automatedinsights.com - writes all the routine corporate earnings stories for Associated Press so they can cover more companies and let journalists actually investigate and write more nuanced pieces. Some earnings reports start with the software writing and get augmented by human journalists.
  - mingabunga 9y ago
    That's where companies like Arria https://www.arria.com/ https://www.arria.com/ doing natural language generation step in so you can't tell the difference if it's machine or human generated. Well that's the promise.
- dheera 9y ago
  > "The corresponding low also paints a picture and suggests that the low is nothing but a 97.89% since 11/14/16." I can't gather any meaning from that statement, yet it has oddly specific details. Maybe it was a horribly sleep-deprived person in Wall Street at 2am and made a cut-and-paste error while half-asleep.
- akhilcacharya 9y ago
  This is definitely machine generated. http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/05/20/406484294/an-npr-reporter-raced-a-machine-to-write-a-news-story-who-won http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/05/20/406484294/an-np...
  - DanBC 9y ago
    That's a great example, because I much prefer the robot version of the Denny article to the human created version.
    - brudgers 9y ago
      For me, neither was worth reading and since the machine generated version was shorter it was less not worth reading than the longer one...but the longer one contained the logical possibility of being worth reading whereas the machine written one was as good as it could possibly be. Or to put it another way, while it was not worth the human effort to write the story, it wasn't worth the CPU cycles to write the machine generated version either. The story was not worth writing or publishing or reading at all because nobody cares including the author (which is why a machine can write it).
      - TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
        > The story was not worth writing or publishing or reading Of course, these are the wrong metrics. The correct metrics are: ad impressions vs. cost to generate content.
        sametmax 9y ago
        Ad impressions read by who ? Triggering which action ?
        anigbrowl 9y ago
        That's only for the publishing side. The reader's utility calculus matters too, and I agree with the other poster that both stories are garbage.
- phreeza 9y ago
  https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22When+you+combine+the+technical+touch+points+we%E2%80%99ve+outlined+above https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22When+you+combine+the+technical+... Seems to be at least some sort of copy and paste going on... edit: This is so bizarre, one of the sites has a section with editor "bios" but they read like some sort of very poor odesk/fiverr profiles, wouldn't be surprised if thats what they are... https://nystocknews.com/our-staff/ https://nystocknews.com/our-staff/
  - dgacmu 9y ago
    The whole thing is full of rehashed phrases: (link to google for "A deeper exploration of the setup is sure to yield a clear picture"): https://www.google.com/search?q=%22A+deeper+exploration+of+the+setup+is+sure+to+yield+a+clearer+picture%22&oq=%22A+deeper+exploration+of+the+setup+is+sure+to+yield+a+clearer+picture%22&aqs=chrome..69i64j5.1631j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=%22A+deeper+exploration+of+t... Craziness. Auto-generated soup to farm SEO?
  - userbinator 9y ago
    This line from those "bios" caught my attention: I’d affection to help you with your written work, altering and substance needs! ...because I mentally "autocorrected" the latter half to "and mind-altering substance needs"... Looks like they used a "thesauriser" on it. Not hard to see love->affection, editing->altering, and content->substance. Of course, if you are under the influence of a mind-altering substance, you would probably not notice anything wrong with that page. ...and unfortunately, so would many people who aren't.
    - phreeza 9y ago
      Ha, and the "de-thesaurised" version of that phrase is indeed from this upwork profile! https://www.upwork.com/o/profiles/users/_~012388b8f7c8ed8aa2/ https://www.upwork.com/o/profiles/users/_~012388b8f7c8ed8aa2...
- Shivetya 9y ago
  I am curious though, will these systems have pen names? A simple name easy enough to recognize as machine written without the need for disclaimer? Could competition be more easily obtained between different companies based on which pen name attracts the most viewers? the one concern I have is someone has to give ths system enough information to create a story and what prevents a fake news machine?
  - andai 9y ago
    I vote for them all to be called Writey McWriterson.
    - tripzilch 9y ago
      My vote is Botty McBotface :)
- hellbanner 9y ago
  "AP's robot journalists are writing their own stories now" https://www.theverge.com/2015/1/29/7939067/ap-journalism-automation-robots-financial-reporting https://www.theverge.com/2015/1/29/7939067/ap-journalism-aut...
- elihu 9y ago
  I'd guess that about a third to half of the "financial news" articles I see on finance.google.com are generated from some sort of template, with a script filling in the details. I'd love to see Google identify and remove these sites from their search results (and any sites that link to them), but I think they either don't think it's a high priority or they don't know how to solve the problem. What will be creepy is if the auto-generated story algorithms get good enough that you can't tell what's written by a human and what isn't, there will no longer a human filter between what some powerful institution wants a news article to say and what makes it into print. Most journalists have a sense of journalistic ethics or at least a reputation to defend; an algorithm has neither of those.
  - jgalt212 9y ago
    Bloomberg has these articles as well. If a service that costs $20K a year is promoting these (and not removing), it's a safe bet "free" Google Finance will be showing more rather than less of these in the future.
- ssivark 9y ago
  From the article (mistakes highlighted): > Human news writers regularly point out that AIs tend to lack nuance and a _flare_ for language in the stories they churn out. That’s probably a _fare_ criticism [...] Maybe they used speech-to-text transcription for this, given that the mistakes are homophones? It seems very unlikely that either a human typing this, or a computerized system would make these mistakes (if it learns word associations from a corpus). PS: the article also claims to be human generated: > This story was not generated by an AI, but to be fair, I haven’t had my coffee yet. EDIT: Oops, I might have misunderstood which article you were referring to, since the reference was not placed next to "this".
  - saurik 9y ago
    FWIW, I absolutely believe that a human would make those kinds of typos while typing... I myself didn't realize "flair for criticism" was spelled like that (and the top hit searching on Google for that, without quotes, is actually a book title using the other spelling, though it may very well have been a purposeful pun...). It would be one thing if those weren't themselves "correctly spelled words" (and so a text editor might catch it), but both "flare" and "fare" could easily slip by unnoticed. I will often even make much more interesting typos, where the word just "sounds sort of like the other word but no one would ever confuse the two", as I tend to speak to myself in my head as I type (and as I read) and I swear all language in my brain is at some point represented as audio... I'm not coming up with any examples right now, but trust me that when they come up they are incredibly strange.
    - TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
      Only slightly tangential, have you come across the term eggcorn[1] before? I always get a chuckle out of thinking about it. 1. In linguistics, an eggcorn is an idiosyncratic substitution of a word or phrase for a word or words that sound similar or identical in the speaker's dialect (sometimes called oronyms). The new phrase introduces a meaning that is different from the original but plausible in the same context, such as "old-timers' disease" for "Alzheimer's disease". - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggcorn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggcorn
  - 9y ago
- iak8god 9y ago
  That "author" published 87 such articles on July 7 2017[0], and a total of over 8,500 so far this year[1]. [0] https://www.nystocknews.com/author/mack-tyler/page/9/ https://www.nystocknews.com/author/mack-tyler/page/9/ [1] https://www.nystocknews.com/author/mack-tyler/page/854/ https://www.nystocknews.com/author/mack-tyler/page/854/
  - mikeyouse 9y ago
    As far as I can tell; None of the authors are real people, the website is registered behind a anonymization service, there is no company registered with their name, the address of their office doesn't exist, the phone number connects to a 'subscriber not in service'... If you look at their Google Ad ID, it was used in the past on the now defunct "TheSportsTruth.com" -- which looks like it primarily existed to shuffle people to a supplement site. From there, there are a ton of links to other random affiliate schemes with sports, 'internet marketing', etc. No sense outing anyone, but I believe I figured out who's behind a few dozen of this shitty sites. The NYStockNews site seems to make its money by referrals to some penny stock scam sites. It's crazy how much 'content' on the internet exists solely to get people to click on links to supplements & penny stock scams.
    - mrkrab 9y ago
      How did you find out that stuff of the google ad id? Especially associating it with past websites.
      - mikeyouse 9y ago
        In the source of every page with Google ads, there's a "Publisher ID" which is a unique identifier for the account. In the case of NYStockNews.com, it shows up as: > google_ad_client: "ca-pub-6009540024781990" From there, there are specialty services that keep track over time, otherwise, you can just search for the trailing digits on Google. When doing so for "6009540024781990", a few sites come up, GDPInsider.com - Another stock bot-written site, and then a dead link with a Google Cache: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Ccudn6ouybUJ:urlquery.net:443/report.php%3Fid%3D1491800213930+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&lr=lang_en%7Clang_pt https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Ccudn6... Using various other tools, you can see the domain registration information over time or ID which servers hosted it, or just find out who was linking to a domain earliest. Reddit is a great site for the latter. Often times, when a 'marketer' sets up a site like these, they immediately run to social media to try and promote it. If you can find the first time it's linked publicly, you can often find out who posted it. That last part is actually one of the ways they tied Ross Ulbricht to The Silk Road -- They found the first public mention of The Silk Road online (The post: https://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/13860995 https://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/1386099...) which was written by 'Altoid' and directed users to a Wordpress page that had been set up a few days earlier. They then found a series of posts on BitcoinTalk by 'Altoid' looking for an IT Pro in the Bitcoin community with instructions to email Ross.Ulbricht@gmail.com if they were interested in a job... He was doing deeply illegal stuff and couldn't be bothered to mask his ID, imagine how easy it is to find rando affiliate marketers.
- nickdavidhaynes 9y ago
  I work for Automated Insights, a company that makes a SaaS platform very similar to what's in the article. Here's an example "in the wild" of the content we produce - http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/business/article158774809.html http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/business/article158774809... Many of your criticisms are totally valid. Lots of the phrasing is awkward - even the lede is really bad ("Tesla, Inc. (TSLA) has been having a set of eventful trading activity"...wat). And it feels really deceptive to put a human byline on an automated article. We're pretty open about the fact that our solution to this problem is not "magical" at all [1, 2] - it's good, old-fashioned automation. This approach allows our customers to QA their content heavily before pushing it to production, which eliminates many of the problems with awkward/incorrect phrasing that people who rely more heavily on machine learning tend to run into. And the news articles we publish always have a note at the end saying that they were generated by Automated Insights, and don't include a human byline. There is real value in this type of reporting - a recent study [3] found that the articles we produce for less well-known publicly-traded companies has increased the trading volume for those companies. The idea is that, yes, the content is fairly formulaic, but there's now reporting on companies that had very little coverage before we existed. There are similar arguments for mass personalization work we've done for companies like Activision Yahoo - having prose that describes raw data (even if it is formulaic to an extent) is often better than not having prose. [1] https://automatedinsights.com/blog/the-state-of-artificial-intelligence https://automatedinsights.com/blog/the-state-of-artificial-i... [2] https://automatedinsights.com/blog/creating-great-automated-content https://automatedinsights.com/blog/creating-great-automated-... [3] https://insights.ap.org/industry-trends/study-news-automation-by-ap-increases-trading-in-financial-markets https://insights.ap.org/industry-trends/study-news-automatio...
  - Borealid 9y ago
    I don't understand what value the prose provides over spending the same amount of effort producing clear, easy to read infographics. Instead of producing awkward and difficult-to-read English sentences, why not use the same content generator to produce completely accurate and easier to read dynamic data visualizations?
    - 9y ago
endswapper 9y ago
This submission is at least tangentially relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14673489 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14673489. Combining these presents an interesting opportunity to create "future news" (news that is technically fake until it isn't) thereby owning the news cycle by always being first.
- PaulHoule 9y ago
  About 15 years ago I had the good luck of covering a news story before it happened and got a truly tremendous amount of traffic as a result.
  - slig 9y ago
    Can you tell us more about it?
    - PaulHoule 9y ago
      Sure. There was a series of anti-war protests at a mall around Albany NY in the run up to the second gulf war. I had been covering the story on a regular basis, but it had gotten very little attention because the media had decided that anti-war protests were not newsworthy. Well, finally at one of these protests they arrest a judge and that is newsworthy. People start looking for names and places and these match the story I'd written at the last protest (where there had not been any arrests.)
      - fjdlwlv 9y ago
        So you didn't write about a future event
        catshirt 9y ago
        They said they covered a news story before "it" happened. If we want to take a considerate interpretation- they wrote about the "news" before the "real news" decided it was "news".
mtgx 9y ago
So what happens when these bots are manipulated into writing fake news (in the same way the way better funded Google search is still manipulated for SEO purposes) ?
- owebmaster 9y ago
  Google makes a lot of money
- maybeiambatman 9y ago
  Then they are just as good/bad as bloggers today :)
mc32 9y ago
At least in the near future, this has the potential to make facts-and-figures based news less biased (less influenced by author idiosyncrasies). Personally, I would rather news not be laden with personal flourishes that authors add either as filler or due to personal opinion. I do imagine further into the future, the automated systems will be "improved" with tone and bias to better fit the tastes of the individual reader, to the detriment of us writ large.
- nkozyra 9y ago
  Presentation of facts alone doesn't really preclude bias, though. Certainly all journalists carry bias - and styleguides and journalistic standards are intended to mitigate this - but any software intended to encapsulate some facts into some allotted space will also carry bias. Source/quote selection and omission will always lend some bias and news by nature has a finite space. Print news in particular imposes bias through strict space requirements, driven editorially. And then there's the weight of the sources quoted, defining a "side" or "angle" to a story and making sure there's balance in opposing voices, etc. I think a lot of people see bias as overt when it can be quite negligible and minor. But then they also often conflate news commentary with news. It's a pretty blurred line. That said, local news (politics, business, crime) tends to skew less toward prescribed narrative and more toward facts and points because it's often very dry.
  - mc32 9y ago
    Understood. Yet, this would still be an improvement over newsstories which try to read insight into something where what they do's more or less projection and speculation without saying so much. "Amazon buys WF". vs "Jeff Bezos buys WF so you never have to talk to a cashier" Or, "Physician runs over pedestrian" vs. "Physician accused of insurance fraud runs over pedestrian"
    - Dylan16807 9y ago
      I'm confused. Your first example seems to be adding pointless false commentary, while the second is adding real information about the person.
chrismealy 9y ago
IIRC there was a small town paper in the early in 1990s that wrote high school sports stories with a HyperCard stack.
- nkozyra 9y ago
  Print journalism is pretty formulaic but one of the bigger challenges is finding and interviewing sources. Most news organizations have requirements on the minimum # per story and who those people should be. It's laborious. Sports, on the other hand, can be presented as a narrative of pre-defined, linear events. Those and crime stories represent probable the easiest form to automate. Pro and college typically warrant some quotes but so often preps are written by a stringer who just details the game.
reallydattrue 9y ago
Very Relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2Ut5GqQ1f4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2Ut5GqQ1f4 Google will one day be the arbitrators of news. If it doesn't fit in their world view, whether it's true or not. Will be removed from the results. I think now is the time to setup a different model and remove their monopoly. Internet freedoms are at stake here. Do no evil? Yeah right.
- 4ad 9y ago
  One day? That day is now.
- sergiotapia 9y ago
  Picus News - The global leader in fair, unbiased, and impartial reporting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9OrmOAuuWc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9OrmOAuuWc
  - dom0 9y ago
    We also do security, surveillance and operate 100.5 % of the satellites around earth. (Looks familiar yet?)
- org3432 9y ago
  Also relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvtNyOzGogc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvtNyOzGogc Sinclair Broadcast Group is doing basically this already, just in a low tech way and requiring its local TV stations to promoting their political agenda.
- OscarTheGrinch 9y ago
  I disagree. There has always been a definable difference between fact and fiction. Both have a place on the net but where fiction masquerades as fact with the intent to decieve, we have a duty to use all the tools at our disposal to destroy that ruse and choose more factual sources on which to base our decisions. I for one welcome our new news overlords.
  - 9y ago
kronos29296 9y ago
What guarantee is there that the published news isn't fake? This might start something like viral fake facebook posts. We already have enough of those. Now we have automated fake news generator where you post your own fake news for free. This is what it will become one day. Hope they have something to stop it.
- minikites 9y ago
  Why would this even be on Google's radar? They make money either way.
- untog 9y ago
  I don't really see what this has to do with fake news. Traditionally produced news stories can be fake, and algorithmically generated stories can be fake (when fed bad data). The only solution to take news is news organisations that people can trust. Historically, local news organisations have always been the most trusted, but their income has been absolutely decimated in the last decade or so. This feels like a desperate cost cutting measure, not something that will help the overall problem.
  - kronos29296 9y ago
    This decreases the barrier to entry. Sometimes that's all it takes to encourage the wrong things. The overall system is failing because it cannot adapt to the new internet age. Hopefully something changes and we get reliable news.
    - illumin8 9y ago
      Ability to automate creation of news = ability to automate creation of propaganda = ability to automate censorship of news.
- tokyoSurfer 9y ago
  I am more afraid of options that this tool would have. Like fine tune it to be 5% friendlier on candidate 1 than 2. Report news on XXX 10% less than on news YYY. Make people happy. Make people sad. Make people compelling. All this by adjusting few options and changing the wording of articles.
jimrandomh 9y ago
I would strongly prefer that robo-written news not exist, not appear in the results of any searches I make, and not appear in any feed that I read. It is pollution that makes real information and insight harder to find. Does anyone actually like this stuff?
- andai 9y ago
  I expect that a couple years from now, this viewpoint (and most of this thread!) will be seen as really offensive.
- tokyoSurfer 9y ago
  This is actually making an opening for "human only" papers, that will be easier to distinguish from noise. Non-profit independent, governing body is a must though to issue certification.
  - rahimnathwani 9y ago
    Like craft beer or artesanal cheese?
- Simon_says 9y ago
  I feel differently. I think there's a place for information that people would like to read as prose but the economics don't make sense to pay someone to write it. I feel like this is an advance that's increasing the wealth of the world because we're going to get more text while spending fewer man-hours on it. And it's just going to get better over time. It's obvious now when something was written by a bot, but I doubt that's going to be true for much longer. But, it should probably be labeled as such. Giving such text a human name as the author is indefensible.
  - harperlee 9y ago
    > Giving such text a human name as the author is indefensible. Why is it indefensible in your opinion? I think it is only fair that if I have a job of writing some output based on some inputs, and I define a process to do that that can be automated, the end product is still my labor, and I can sign it.
zzalpha 9y ago
Having just finished a play-through of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, this immediately makes me think of Eliza Kassan... it really is odd how many ideas in that game don't seem especially far-fetched these days.
velobro 9y ago
Good! I'm sure a bot is a lot better writer than the high school graduates my local paper employs.
apeacox 9y ago
Welcome to the Ministry of Truth
divbit 9y ago
For the reporters friends I have, not sure how I feel about that - if I was a reporter, I feel I would want some software which enhances and improves my job experience and reporting ability, rather than flat out replaces it. (Not to criticize google, I'm sure any company startup, could be doing the same).
kevinphy 9y ago
A relevant and inspiring project with the statement: "Only Robot Can Free Information" https://medium.com/rosenbridge/only-robot-can-free-information-9f4ac3bb0701 https://medium.com/rosenbridge/only-robot-can-free-informati... Focusing on building robot for reader instead of news provider would be the future.
DanBC 9y ago
There are 2 things I hope google or other AI companies focus on. 1) Making board papers more readable. There's a bunch of trusts in the NHS who have a stream of very complex board papers. Something to reduce un-needed complexity would save a lot of time and potentially money. 2) Converting all important documents to an Easy Read version. There are a bunch of writing styles for people with learning disability, low IQ, or low literacy. Easy Read is one. A company like Google focusing on this would be good because they'd improve the evidence base; they'd bring a bit more standardisation; and they'd improve access to information for many people.
ams6110 9y ago
Don't most reporters start out with obscure/niche stories so they can hone their writing styles on relatively "unimportant" or filler pieces? If machines do all of that work, how do reporters develop the experience to be able to write an organized, in-depth important story?
- notyourwork 9y ago
  I don't think reporters exist in this scenario.
gumby 9y ago
The irony is that the I how radio news got its start. Ronald Reagan became an actor after being a "sports announcer" -- what he really did was read the ticker tape of a game in progress ("smith at plate. first ball strike no swing. Second ball base hit") and create an exciting story to go with it "And smith steps up to the plate. He flexes his muscles, kicks the ground and takes his stance. He passes on the first ball....strike! Here's the next pitch...he swings...solid towards third base. Is it a foul? NO!! AND HE'S SAFE ON FIRST BASE!!!" Really most "news" articles are only a couple of paragraphs long anyway and could be expanded or contracted on the spot to match the interest of the reader.
Kenji 9y ago
Without machines acquiring true understanding of what is happening, this is going nowhere. I applaud their effort but it is misguided.
mnglkhn2 9y ago
The question is: How are those news items going to be named: Robo news? Or maybe "fake news", until 'elevated' by Google curators? Maybe Microsoft's Ai bot experiment might offer a cautionary tale.
- mingabunga 9y ago
  It's not actually Google doing it, they're just funding it. Here's a better article https://www.recode.net/2017/7/7/15937436/google-news-media-robots-automate-writing-local-news-stories https://www.recode.net/2017/7/7/15937436/google-news-media-r...
speeq 9y ago
I recently found a YouTube channel with news videos that seem generated mostly programatically with a robot voice over and a combined +44M views on the channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzhc-N5YynO_shpHhzP2zuw/videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzhc-N5YynO_shpHhzP2zuw/vid... I wonder who's behind these and similar channels.
fiatjaf 9y ago
Why? This is horrible. Why not just publish the raw data reporters got?
downandout 9y ago
Ironically, the Adsense "valuable inventory" policy prohibits showing Google ads on automaitcally generated content [1]. I wonder if they will follow their own rules and refuse to show ads on content generated by this tool. [1] https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/1346295?hl=en https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/1346295?hl=en
- usmannk 9y ago
  Adsense policy: "Examples of unacceptable pages include ... Automatically generated content without manual review or curation" Article: "People will be involved in the curation and editing of the stories"
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
methodin 9y ago
Random thoughts: * Facts delivered with arbitrary fluff words is pointless even when written by a human - it obfuscates the real purpose which is the data * Companies pay humans to deliver articles in most cases and the bias of the writer or the institution that paid for it shines through. I cannot find a real difference between intentional angling by payment or by algorithm * When the day arises where computers could generate actually new, intelligent and thoughtful pieces I for one will be very interested in reading them. Sadly there would be millions of variations that could occur at an astounding pace. We'd then need algorithms to filter the generated content for the things that are really noteworthy. * News at its core is a sequence of facts which begs the question if we really need the cruft around those facts which can often lead to misinterpretation?
- drawkbox 9y ago
  True but think about this though, Hunter S. Thompson started out as a sports writer. Sports is a big area where this is used currently. Gonzo journalism wouldn't have even been a thing if it was all robo-writing at the time. I think it comes down to flavor/style. Even in food for instance, yes a robot can make a meal but a chef can make a dish (maybe later reproduced by robots but still). There will always be a need for style, which is really hard to automate.
  - lspress 9y ago
    Unless the writer with style is the one training the AI...
haterswillhate 9y ago
Fake news generator is invented a loooong time ago by CNN and Facebook. Why to invent wheel again ? Does this version have better fact checking with alternative word processor ? How detail this version is about moodmapping to connectivity ideology flow ?
haterswillhate 9y ago
Google do not suprise me anymore at all. Just a same as its competitors.. facebook, google, twitter.. whats the difference really ?
akadien 9y ago
Google is the problem. I thought they didn't want to be evil.
adorable 9y ago
What would those article-writing robots use as their primary source of information? If they write local news, will they use social media as their datasource? Other sources?
tyingq 9y ago
Somewhat ironic as Google has been fighting link spammers that use autogenerated content for years. Software like this is popular in that space: https://wordai.com https://wordai.com
cwp 9y ago
Ugh. The last thing the world needs is more formulaic news stories. We need to move past the idea that the web is a virtual newspaper. News sites don't even use hyperlinks effectively, let alone audio/video/interaction. We should use AI to replace newspapers, not reporters.
andy_ppp 9y ago
I think the disgust factor will go away in a few years (maybe less) when most content is written by machines with slanting that the models say you will enjoy. Or that will cause you to spend money. Or click ads. You think you won't succumb to their influence now, but it'll happen and there will even be "journalists" who are machines that you like. The filter bubble will completely adapt to your every need to make you feel fantastic about reading their copy, humans won't be able to compete.
- babyrainbow 9y ago
  I am not sure. Do you read news for entertainment, or do you read it for truth?
  - andy_ppp 9y ago
    The algorithm will adapt to your every need.
tannhaeuser 9y ago
What about developing a counter-bot that detects and flags algorithmic content? Edit: come to think about it, isn't it what Google should be rather doing?
- notahacker 9y ago
  Yeah. Google has spent years taking the position that extremely thin content generated at a massive scale involving no genuine research or insight is spam that should be penalised. Now it's writing software to do just this.
  - askvictor 9y ago
    Maybe they're doing it to train their spam story detection algorithms?
  - lspress 9y ago
    I think this may be a misconception on Google's stance on content generated at a massive scale. They dock you for text spinner type content, stuff with little variation, nonsense phrasing, and identical sentences pieced together in different articles from the same source. Content generated at massive scales that are actually useful and disseminated from multiple publishers (like local news sources) are what they don't punish.
em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
We still haven't solved concerns about computers controlling our news feed, much less writing our news...
igammarays 9y ago
Color me extremely skeptical that current-generation AI can ever write decent quality news articles, even on the "easiest" subjects (i.e. non-emotional topics that may be most amenable to computerization). Sure, an AI might be able to produce the type of contradictory and fundamentally meaningless strings-of-words that characterize Trumpian speech, but even that would lack a unified agenda behind it. Even Trump seems to appeal to some raw masculine #MAGA emotion pretty consistently, but I doubt an AI would be able to do even that. If an AI could produce decent news articles with consistently meaningful statements, I think it would have huge implications for linguistic theory. Currently, we have no way of representing abstract semantic meaning in a computer, for example when I say the word "justice", you all know what I'm talking about because you all have embodied experiences of "justice" (or its opposite) in your personal lives (e.g. bullying). An AI simply never had access to this kind of embodied, experiential input. It only has access to patterns of strings that we humans produce. And so why should we expect an AI to be able to ever produce the same output that we produce when it has access to less input? Sure, one might argue that news articles are not novels, and so require a lower threshold of understanding to produce. I don't think so. We tend to underestimate the embodied nature of even the most basic use of language[0]. [0] See The Embodied Mind by Varela, Thompson, and Rosch.

189 points by tokyoSurfer 9y ago

I was just thinking that journalism needed less on the ground reporting and critical thought. More mindless aggregation and repeating of existing data custom tailored to the views of the people reading it is really whats missing.

11thEarlOfMar 9y ago

I ran across this article while researching a stock and as I read, I kept thinking, "This was not written by a person. This was written by software." [0] I checked the attribution, and there is a person's name on it. Sure, any hack can write and publish and this is probably just another example. But the odd style doesn't even strike me as 'writing the way I think' or writing and publishing quickly without editing. For example, from the 2nd paragraph, "The corresponding low also paints a picture and suggests that the low is nothing but a 97.89% since 11/14/16." I can't gather any meaning from that statement, yet it has oddly specific details. I am not glad to see this trend and not glad that Google is embarking on this path. I suppose it is inevitable, but unless there is expertise built into this AI that can extract meaning from data on my behalf and present it in a way that is more insightful and interesting than I am, it will become yet another source of chaff I'll have to filter. Can we at least, please, flag AI generated prose as such? [0] https://www.nystocknews.com/2017/07/05/tesla-inc-tsla-showcases-what-it-has-to-offer-via-the-technical-chart/ https://www.nystocknews.com/2017/07/05/tesla-inc-tsla-showca...

revmoo 9y ago
Those articles are all over the web on all sorts of throwaway made-up sites. They're absolutely computer generated. They make for really annoying search engine spam.
semperdark 9y ago
I've also noticed this on financial/stock news articles. I've seen a few of them use full 4-word names for corporations ("The Coca-Cola Company") dozens of times in one article, and multiple times per sentence.
- dom0 9y ago
  These are indeed frequently generated automatically.
- fjdlwlv 9y ago
  Yes, finance and sports and weather and other metrics reporting is already highly automated.
  - lspress 9y ago
    Automated Insights https://automatedinsights.com https://automatedinsights.com - writes all the routine corporate earnings stories for Associated Press so they can cover more companies and let journalists actually investigate and write more nuanced pieces. Some earnings reports start with the software writing and get augmented by human journalists.
- mingabunga 9y ago
  That's where companies like Arria https://www.arria.com/ https://www.arria.com/ doing natural language generation step in so you can't tell the difference if it's machine or human generated. Well that's the promise.
dheera 9y ago
> "The corresponding low also paints a picture and suggests that the low is nothing but a 97.89% since 11/14/16." I can't gather any meaning from that statement, yet it has oddly specific details. Maybe it was a horribly sleep-deprived person in Wall Street at 2am and made a cut-and-paste error while half-asleep.
akhilcacharya 9y ago
This is definitely machine generated. http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/05/20/406484294/an-npr-reporter-raced-a-machine-to-write-a-news-story-who-won http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/05/20/406484294/an-np...
- DanBC 9y ago
  That's a great example, because I much prefer the robot version of the Denny article to the human created version.
  - brudgers 9y ago
    For me, neither was worth reading and since the machine generated version was shorter it was less not worth reading than the longer one...but the longer one contained the logical possibility of being worth reading whereas the machine written one was as good as it could possibly be. Or to put it another way, while it was not worth the human effort to write the story, it wasn't worth the CPU cycles to write the machine generated version either. The story was not worth writing or publishing or reading at all because nobody cares including the author (which is why a machine can write it).
    - TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
      > The story was not worth writing or publishing or reading Of course, these are the wrong metrics. The correct metrics are: ad impressions vs. cost to generate content.
      - sametmax 9y ago
        Ad impressions read by who ? Triggering which action ?
      - anigbrowl 9y ago
        That's only for the publishing side. The reader's utility calculus matters too, and I agree with the other poster that both stories are garbage.
phreeza 9y ago
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22When+you+combine+the+technical+touch+points+we%E2%80%99ve+outlined+above https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22When+you+combine+the+technical+... Seems to be at least some sort of copy and paste going on... edit: This is so bizarre, one of the sites has a section with editor "bios" but they read like some sort of very poor odesk/fiverr profiles, wouldn't be surprised if thats what they are... https://nystocknews.com/our-staff/ https://nystocknews.com/our-staff/
- dgacmu 9y ago
  The whole thing is full of rehashed phrases: (link to google for "A deeper exploration of the setup is sure to yield a clear picture"): https://www.google.com/search?q=%22A+deeper+exploration+of+the+setup+is+sure+to+yield+a+clearer+picture%22&oq=%22A+deeper+exploration+of+the+setup+is+sure+to+yield+a+clearer+picture%22&aqs=chrome..69i64j5.1631j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=%22A+deeper+exploration+of+t... Craziness. Auto-generated soup to farm SEO?
- userbinator 9y ago
  This line from those "bios" caught my attention: I’d affection to help you with your written work, altering and substance needs! ...because I mentally "autocorrected" the latter half to "and mind-altering substance needs"... Looks like they used a "thesauriser" on it. Not hard to see love->affection, editing->altering, and content->substance. Of course, if you are under the influence of a mind-altering substance, you would probably not notice anything wrong with that page. ...and unfortunately, so would many people who aren't.
  - phreeza 9y ago
    Ha, and the "de-thesaurised" version of that phrase is indeed from this upwork profile! https://www.upwork.com/o/profiles/users/_~012388b8f7c8ed8aa2/ https://www.upwork.com/o/profiles/users/_~012388b8f7c8ed8aa2...
Shivetya 9y ago
I am curious though, will these systems have pen names? A simple name easy enough to recognize as machine written without the need for disclaimer? Could competition be more easily obtained between different companies based on which pen name attracts the most viewers? the one concern I have is someone has to give ths system enough information to create a story and what prevents a fake news machine?
- andai 9y ago
  I vote for them all to be called Writey McWriterson.
  - tripzilch 9y ago
    My vote is Botty McBotface :)
hellbanner 9y ago
"AP's robot journalists are writing their own stories now" https://www.theverge.com/2015/1/29/7939067/ap-journalism-automation-robots-financial-reporting https://www.theverge.com/2015/1/29/7939067/ap-journalism-aut...
elihu 9y ago
I'd guess that about a third to half of the "financial news" articles I see on finance.google.com are generated from some sort of template, with a script filling in the details. I'd love to see Google identify and remove these sites from their search results (and any sites that link to them), but I think they either don't think it's a high priority or they don't know how to solve the problem. What will be creepy is if the auto-generated story algorithms get good enough that you can't tell what's written by a human and what isn't, there will no longer a human filter between what some powerful institution wants a news article to say and what makes it into print. Most journalists have a sense of journalistic ethics or at least a reputation to defend; an algorithm has neither of those.
- jgalt212 9y ago
  Bloomberg has these articles as well. If a service that costs $20K a year is promoting these (and not removing), it's a safe bet "free" Google Finance will be showing more rather than less of these in the future.
ssivark 9y ago
From the article (mistakes highlighted): > Human news writers regularly point out that AIs tend to lack nuance and a _flare_ for language in the stories they churn out. That’s probably a _fare_ criticism [...] Maybe they used speech-to-text transcription for this, given that the mistakes are homophones? It seems very unlikely that either a human typing this, or a computerized system would make these mistakes (if it learns word associations from a corpus). PS: the article also claims to be human generated: > This story was not generated by an AI, but to be fair, I haven’t had my coffee yet. EDIT: Oops, I might have misunderstood which article you were referring to, since the reference was not placed next to "this".
- saurik 9y ago
  FWIW, I absolutely believe that a human would make those kinds of typos while typing... I myself didn't realize "flair for criticism" was spelled like that (and the top hit searching on Google for that, without quotes, is actually a book title using the other spelling, though it may very well have been a purposeful pun...). It would be one thing if those weren't themselves "correctly spelled words" (and so a text editor might catch it), but both "flare" and "fare" could easily slip by unnoticed. I will often even make much more interesting typos, where the word just "sounds sort of like the other word but no one would ever confuse the two", as I tend to speak to myself in my head as I type (and as I read) and I swear all language in my brain is at some point represented as audio... I'm not coming up with any examples right now, but trust me that when they come up they are incredibly strange.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
    Only slightly tangential, have you come across the term eggcorn[1] before? I always get a chuckle out of thinking about it. 1. In linguistics, an eggcorn is an idiosyncratic substitution of a word or phrase for a word or words that sound similar or identical in the speaker's dialect (sometimes called oronyms). The new phrase introduces a meaning that is different from the original but plausible in the same context, such as "old-timers' disease" for "Alzheimer's disease". - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggcorn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggcorn
- 9y ago
iak8god 9y ago
That "author" published 87 such articles on July 7 2017[0], and a total of over 8,500 so far this year[1]. [0] https://www.nystocknews.com/author/mack-tyler/page/9/ https://www.nystocknews.com/author/mack-tyler/page/9/ [1] https://www.nystocknews.com/author/mack-tyler/page/854/ https://www.nystocknews.com/author/mack-tyler/page/854/
- mikeyouse 9y ago
  As far as I can tell; None of the authors are real people, the website is registered behind a anonymization service, there is no company registered with their name, the address of their office doesn't exist, the phone number connects to a 'subscriber not in service'... If you look at their Google Ad ID, it was used in the past on the now defunct "TheSportsTruth.com" -- which looks like it primarily existed to shuffle people to a supplement site. From there, there are a ton of links to other random affiliate schemes with sports, 'internet marketing', etc. No sense outing anyone, but I believe I figured out who's behind a few dozen of this shitty sites. The NYStockNews site seems to make its money by referrals to some penny stock scam sites. It's crazy how much 'content' on the internet exists solely to get people to click on links to supplements & penny stock scams.
  - mrkrab 9y ago
    How did you find out that stuff of the google ad id? Especially associating it with past websites.
    - mikeyouse 9y ago
      In the source of every page with Google ads, there's a "Publisher ID" which is a unique identifier for the account. In the case of NYStockNews.com, it shows up as: > google_ad_client: "ca-pub-6009540024781990" From there, there are specialty services that keep track over time, otherwise, you can just search for the trailing digits on Google. When doing so for "6009540024781990", a few sites come up, GDPInsider.com - Another stock bot-written site, and then a dead link with a Google Cache: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Ccudn6ouybUJ:urlquery.net:443/report.php%3Fid%3D1491800213930+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&lr=lang_en%7Clang_pt https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Ccudn6... Using various other tools, you can see the domain registration information over time or ID which servers hosted it, or just find out who was linking to a domain earliest. Reddit is a great site for the latter. Often times, when a 'marketer' sets up a site like these, they immediately run to social media to try and promote it. If you can find the first time it's linked publicly, you can often find out who posted it. That last part is actually one of the ways they tied Ross Ulbricht to The Silk Road -- They found the first public mention of The Silk Road online (The post: https://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/13860995 https://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/1386099...) which was written by 'Altoid' and directed users to a Wordpress page that had been set up a few days earlier. They then found a series of posts on BitcoinTalk by 'Altoid' looking for an IT Pro in the Bitcoin community with instructions to email Ross.Ulbricht@gmail.com if they were interested in a job... He was doing deeply illegal stuff and couldn't be bothered to mask his ID, imagine how easy it is to find rando affiliate marketers.
nickdavidhaynes 9y ago
I work for Automated Insights, a company that makes a SaaS platform very similar to what's in the article. Here's an example "in the wild" of the content we produce - http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/business/article158774809.html http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/business/article158774809... Many of your criticisms are totally valid. Lots of the phrasing is awkward - even the lede is really bad ("Tesla, Inc. (TSLA) has been having a set of eventful trading activity"...wat). And it feels really deceptive to put a human byline on an automated article. We're pretty open about the fact that our solution to this problem is not "magical" at all [1, 2] - it's good, old-fashioned automation. This approach allows our customers to QA their content heavily before pushing it to production, which eliminates many of the problems with awkward/incorrect phrasing that people who rely more heavily on machine learning tend to run into. And the news articles we publish always have a note at the end saying that they were generated by Automated Insights, and don't include a human byline. There is real value in this type of reporting - a recent study [3] found that the articles we produce for less well-known publicly-traded companies has increased the trading volume for those companies. The idea is that, yes, the content is fairly formulaic, but there's now reporting on companies that had very little coverage before we existed. There are similar arguments for mass personalization work we've done for companies like Activision Yahoo - having prose that describes raw data (even if it is formulaic to an extent) is often better than not having prose. [1] https://automatedinsights.com/blog/the-state-of-artificial-intelligence https://automatedinsights.com/blog/the-state-of-artificial-i... [2] https://automatedinsights.com/blog/creating-great-automated-content https://automatedinsights.com/blog/creating-great-automated-... [3] https://insights.ap.org/industry-trends/study-news-automation-by-ap-increases-trading-in-financial-markets https://insights.ap.org/industry-trends/study-news-automatio...
- Borealid 9y ago
  I don't understand what value the prose provides over spending the same amount of effort producing clear, easy to read infographics. Instead of producing awkward and difficult-to-read English sentences, why not use the same content generator to produce completely accurate and easier to read dynamic data visualizations?
  - 9y ago

endswapper 9y ago

This submission is at least tangentially relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14673489 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14673489. Combining these presents an interesting opportunity to create "future news" (news that is technically fake until it isn't) thereby owning the news cycle by always being first.

PaulHoule 9y ago
About 15 years ago I had the good luck of covering a news story before it happened and got a truly tremendous amount of traffic as a result.
- slig 9y ago
  Can you tell us more about it?
  - PaulHoule 9y ago
    Sure. There was a series of anti-war protests at a mall around Albany NY in the run up to the second gulf war. I had been covering the story on a regular basis, but it had gotten very little attention because the media had decided that anti-war protests were not newsworthy. Well, finally at one of these protests they arrest a judge and that is newsworthy. People start looking for names and places and these match the story I'd written at the last protest (where there had not been any arrests.)
    - fjdlwlv 9y ago
      So you didn't write about a future event
      - catshirt 9y ago
        They said they covered a news story before "it" happened. If we want to take a considerate interpretation- they wrote about the "news" before the "real news" decided it was "news".

mtgx 9y ago

So what happens when these bots are manipulated into writing fake news (in the same way the way better funded Google search is still manipulated for SEO purposes) ?

owebmaster 9y ago
Google makes a lot of money
maybeiambatman 9y ago
Then they are just as good/bad as bloggers today :)

mc32 9y ago

At least in the near future, this has the potential to make facts-and-figures based news less biased (less influenced by author idiosyncrasies). Personally, I would rather news not be laden with personal flourishes that authors add either as filler or due to personal opinion. I do imagine further into the future, the automated systems will be "improved" with tone and bias to better fit the tastes of the individual reader, to the detriment of us writ large.

nkozyra 9y ago
Presentation of facts alone doesn't really preclude bias, though. Certainly all journalists carry bias - and styleguides and journalistic standards are intended to mitigate this - but any software intended to encapsulate some facts into some allotted space will also carry bias. Source/quote selection and omission will always lend some bias and news by nature has a finite space. Print news in particular imposes bias through strict space requirements, driven editorially. And then there's the weight of the sources quoted, defining a "side" or "angle" to a story and making sure there's balance in opposing voices, etc. I think a lot of people see bias as overt when it can be quite negligible and minor. But then they also often conflate news commentary with news. It's a pretty blurred line. That said, local news (politics, business, crime) tends to skew less toward prescribed narrative and more toward facts and points because it's often very dry.
- mc32 9y ago
  Understood. Yet, this would still be an improvement over newsstories which try to read insight into something where what they do's more or less projection and speculation without saying so much. "Amazon buys WF". vs "Jeff Bezos buys WF so you never have to talk to a cashier" Or, "Physician runs over pedestrian" vs. "Physician accused of insurance fraud runs over pedestrian"
  - Dylan16807 9y ago
    I'm confused. Your first example seems to be adding pointless false commentary, while the second is adding real information about the person.

chrismealy 9y ago

IIRC there was a small town paper in the early in 1990s that wrote high school sports stories with a HyperCard stack.

nkozyra 9y ago
Print journalism is pretty formulaic but one of the bigger challenges is finding and interviewing sources. Most news organizations have requirements on the minimum # per story and who those people should be. It's laborious. Sports, on the other hand, can be presented as a narrative of pre-defined, linear events. Those and crime stories represent probable the easiest form to automate. Pro and college typically warrant some quotes but so often preps are written by a stringer who just details the game.

reallydattrue 9y ago

Very Relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2Ut5GqQ1f4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2Ut5GqQ1f4 Google will one day be the arbitrators of news. If it doesn't fit in their world view, whether it's true or not. Will be removed from the results. I think now is the time to setup a different model and remove their monopoly. Internet freedoms are at stake here. Do no evil? Yeah right.

4ad 9y ago
One day? That day is now.
sergiotapia 9y ago
Picus News - The global leader in fair, unbiased, and impartial reporting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9OrmOAuuWc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9OrmOAuuWc
- dom0 9y ago
  We also do security, surveillance and operate 100.5 % of the satellites around earth. (Looks familiar yet?)
org3432 9y ago
Also relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvtNyOzGogc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvtNyOzGogc Sinclair Broadcast Group is doing basically this already, just in a low tech way and requiring its local TV stations to promoting their political agenda.
OscarTheGrinch 9y ago
I disagree. There has always been a definable difference between fact and fiction. Both have a place on the net but where fiction masquerades as fact with the intent to decieve, we have a duty to use all the tools at our disposal to destroy that ruse and choose more factual sources on which to base our decisions. I for one welcome our new news overlords.
- 9y ago

kronos29296 9y ago

What guarantee is there that the published news isn't fake? This might start something like viral fake facebook posts. We already have enough of those. Now we have automated fake news generator where you post your own fake news for free. This is what it will become one day. Hope they have something to stop it.

minikites 9y ago
Why would this even be on Google's radar? They make money either way.
untog 9y ago
I don't really see what this has to do with fake news. Traditionally produced news stories can be fake, and algorithmically generated stories can be fake (when fed bad data). The only solution to take news is news organisations that people can trust. Historically, local news organisations have always been the most trusted, but their income has been absolutely decimated in the last decade or so. This feels like a desperate cost cutting measure, not something that will help the overall problem.
- kronos29296 9y ago
  This decreases the barrier to entry. Sometimes that's all it takes to encourage the wrong things. The overall system is failing because it cannot adapt to the new internet age. Hopefully something changes and we get reliable news.
  - illumin8 9y ago
    Ability to automate creation of news = ability to automate creation of propaganda = ability to automate censorship of news.
tokyoSurfer 9y ago
I am more afraid of options that this tool would have. Like fine tune it to be 5% friendlier on candidate 1 than 2. Report news on XXX 10% less than on news YYY. Make people happy. Make people sad. Make people compelling. All this by adjusting few options and changing the wording of articles.

jimrandomh 9y ago

I would strongly prefer that robo-written news not exist, not appear in the results of any searches I make, and not appear in any feed that I read. It is pollution that makes real information and insight harder to find. Does anyone actually like this stuff?

andai 9y ago
I expect that a couple years from now, this viewpoint (and most of this thread!) will be seen as really offensive.
tokyoSurfer 9y ago
This is actually making an opening for "human only" papers, that will be easier to distinguish from noise. Non-profit independent, governing body is a must though to issue certification.
- rahimnathwani 9y ago
  Like craft beer or artesanal cheese?
Simon_says 9y ago
I feel differently. I think there's a place for information that people would like to read as prose but the economics don't make sense to pay someone to write it. I feel like this is an advance that's increasing the wealth of the world because we're going to get more text while spending fewer man-hours on it. And it's just going to get better over time. It's obvious now when something was written by a bot, but I doubt that's going to be true for much longer. But, it should probably be labeled as such. Giving such text a human name as the author is indefensible.
- harperlee 9y ago
  > Giving such text a human name as the author is indefensible. Why is it indefensible in your opinion? I think it is only fair that if I have a job of writing some output based on some inputs, and I define a process to do that that can be automated, the end product is still my labor, and I can sign it.

zzalpha 9y ago

Having just finished a play-through of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, this immediately makes me think of Eliza Kassan... it really is odd how many ideas in that game don't seem especially far-fetched these days.

velobro 9y ago

Good! I'm sure a bot is a lot better writer than the high school graduates my local paper employs.

apeacox 9y ago

Welcome to the Ministry of Truth

divbit 9y ago

For the reporters friends I have, not sure how I feel about that - if I was a reporter, I feel I would want some software which enhances and improves my job experience and reporting ability, rather than flat out replaces it. (Not to criticize google, I'm sure any company startup, could be doing the same).

kevinphy 9y ago

A relevant and inspiring project with the statement: "Only Robot Can Free Information" https://medium.com/rosenbridge/only-robot-can-free-information-9f4ac3bb0701 https://medium.com/rosenbridge/only-robot-can-free-informati... Focusing on building robot for reader instead of news provider would be the future.

DanBC 9y ago

There are 2 things I hope google or other AI companies focus on. 1) Making board papers more readable. There's a bunch of trusts in the NHS who have a stream of very complex board papers. Something to reduce un-needed complexity would save a lot of time and potentially money. 2) Converting all important documents to an Easy Read version. There are a bunch of writing styles for people with learning disability, low IQ, or low literacy. Easy Read is one. A company like Google focusing on this would be good because they'd improve the evidence base; they'd bring a bit more standardisation; and they'd improve access to information for many people.

ams6110 9y ago

Don't most reporters start out with obscure/niche stories so they can hone their writing styles on relatively "unimportant" or filler pieces? If machines do all of that work, how do reporters develop the experience to be able to write an organized, in-depth important story?

notyourwork 9y ago
I don't think reporters exist in this scenario.

gumby 9y ago

The irony is that the I how radio news got its start. Ronald Reagan became an actor after being a "sports announcer" -- what he really did was read the ticker tape of a game in progress ("smith at plate. first ball strike no swing. Second ball base hit") and create an exciting story to go with it "And smith steps up to the plate. He flexes his muscles, kicks the ground and takes his stance. He passes on the first ball....strike! Here's the next pitch...he swings...solid towards third base. Is it a foul? NO!! AND HE'S SAFE ON FIRST BASE!!!" Really most "news" articles are only a couple of paragraphs long anyway and could be expanded or contracted on the spot to match the interest of the reader.

Kenji 9y ago

Without machines acquiring true understanding of what is happening, this is going nowhere. I applaud their effort but it is misguided.

mnglkhn2 9y ago

The question is: How are those news items going to be named: Robo news? Or maybe "fake news", until 'elevated' by Google curators? Maybe Microsoft's Ai bot experiment might offer a cautionary tale.

mingabunga 9y ago
It's not actually Google doing it, they're just funding it. Here's a better article https://www.recode.net/2017/7/7/15937436/google-news-media-robots-automate-writing-local-news-stories https://www.recode.net/2017/7/7/15937436/google-news-media-r...

speeq 9y ago

I recently found a YouTube channel with news videos that seem generated mostly programatically with a robot voice over and a combined +44M views on the channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzhc-N5YynO_shpHhzP2zuw/videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzhc-N5YynO_shpHhzP2zuw/vid... I wonder who's behind these and similar channels.

fiatjaf 9y ago

Why? This is horrible. Why not just publish the raw data reporters got?

downandout 9y ago

Ironically, the Adsense "valuable inventory" policy prohibits showing Google ads on automaitcally generated content [1]. I wonder if they will follow their own rules and refuse to show ads on content generated by this tool. [1] https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/1346295?hl=en https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/1346295?hl=en

usmannk 9y ago
Adsense policy: "Examples of unacceptable pages include ... Automatically generated content without manual review or curation" Article: "People will be involved in the curation and editing of the stories"

deleted 9y ago

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methodin 9y ago

Random thoughts: * Facts delivered with arbitrary fluff words is pointless even when written by a human - it obfuscates the real purpose which is the data * Companies pay humans to deliver articles in most cases and the bias of the writer or the institution that paid for it shines through. I cannot find a real difference between intentional angling by payment or by algorithm * When the day arises where computers could generate actually new, intelligent and thoughtful pieces I for one will be very interested in reading them. Sadly there would be millions of variations that could occur at an astounding pace. We'd then need algorithms to filter the generated content for the things that are really noteworthy. * News at its core is a sequence of facts which begs the question if we really need the cruft around those facts which can often lead to misinterpretation?

drawkbox 9y ago
True but think about this though, Hunter S. Thompson started out as a sports writer. Sports is a big area where this is used currently. Gonzo journalism wouldn't have even been a thing if it was all robo-writing at the time. I think it comes down to flavor/style. Even in food for instance, yes a robot can make a meal but a chef can make a dish (maybe later reproduced by robots but still). There will always be a need for style, which is really hard to automate.
- lspress 9y ago
  Unless the writer with style is the one training the AI...

haterswillhate 9y ago

Fake news generator is invented a loooong time ago by CNN and Facebook. Why to invent wheel again ? Does this version have better fact checking with alternative word processor ? How detail this version is about moodmapping to connectivity ideology flow ?

haterswillhate 9y ago

Google do not suprise me anymore at all. Just a same as its competitors.. facebook, google, twitter.. whats the difference really ?

akadien 9y ago

Google is the problem. I thought they didn't want to be evil.

adorable 9y ago

What would those article-writing robots use as their primary source of information? If they write local news, will they use social media as their datasource? Other sources?

tyingq 9y ago

Somewhat ironic as Google has been fighting link spammers that use autogenerated content for years. Software like this is popular in that space: https://wordai.com https://wordai.com

cwp 9y ago

Ugh. The last thing the world needs is more formulaic news stories. We need to move past the idea that the web is a virtual newspaper. News sites don't even use hyperlinks effectively, let alone audio/video/interaction. We should use AI to replace newspapers, not reporters.

andy_ppp 9y ago

I think the disgust factor will go away in a few years (maybe less) when most content is written by machines with slanting that the models say you will enjoy. Or that will cause you to spend money. Or click ads. You think you won't succumb to their influence now, but it'll happen and there will even be "journalists" who are machines that you like. The filter bubble will completely adapt to your every need to make you feel fantastic about reading their copy, humans won't be able to compete.

babyrainbow 9y ago
I am not sure. Do you read news for entertainment, or do you read it for truth?
- andy_ppp 9y ago
  The algorithm will adapt to your every need.

tannhaeuser 9y ago

What about developing a counter-bot that detects and flags algorithmic content? Edit: come to think about it, isn't it what Google should be rather doing?

notahacker 9y ago
Yeah. Google has spent years taking the position that extremely thin content generated at a massive scale involving no genuine research or insight is spam that should be penalised. Now it's writing software to do just this.
- askvictor 9y ago
  Maybe they're doing it to train their spam story detection algorithms?
- lspress 9y ago
  I think this may be a misconception on Google's stance on content generated at a massive scale. They dock you for text spinner type content, stuff with little variation, nonsense phrasing, and identical sentences pieced together in different articles from the same source. Content generated at massive scales that are actually useful and disseminated from multiple publishers (like local news sources) are what they don't punish.

em3rgent0rdr 9y ago

We still haven't solved concerns about computers controlling our news feed, much less writing our news...

igammarays 9y ago

Color me extremely skeptical that current-generation AI can ever write decent quality news articles, even on the "easiest" subjects (i.e. non-emotional topics that may be most amenable to computerization). Sure, an AI might be able to produce the type of contradictory and fundamentally meaningless strings-of-words that characterize Trumpian speech, but even that would lack a unified agenda behind it. Even Trump seems to appeal to some raw masculine #MAGA emotion pretty consistently, but I doubt an AI would be able to do even that. If an AI could produce decent news articles with consistently meaningful statements, I think it would have huge implications for linguistic theory. Currently, we have no way of representing abstract semantic meaning in a computer, for example when I say the word "justice", you all know what I'm talking about because you all have embodied experiences of "justice" (or its opposite) in your personal lives (e.g. bullying). An AI simply never had access to this kind of embodied, experiential input. It only has access to patterns of strings that we humans produce. And so why should we expect an AI to be able to ever produce the same output that we produce when it has access to less input? Sure, one might argue that news articles are not novels, and so require a lower threshold of understanding to produce. I don't think so. We tend to underestimate the embodied nature of even the most basic use of language[0]. [0] See The Embodied Mind by Varela, Thompson, and Rosch.