Cumputer can write articles withou human intervention...

[paf]

Guys, I just found this article here about a new software that can write articles from a set of data:

“WISCONSIN appears to be in the driver’s seat en route to a win, as it leads 51-10 after the third quarter. Wisconsin added to its lead when Russell Wilson found Jacob Pedersen for an eight-yard touchdown to make the score 44-3 ... . ”

Those words began a news brief written within 60 seconds of the end of the third quarter of the Wisconsin-U.N.L.V. football game earlier this month. They may not seem like much — but they were written by a computer.

The clever code is the handiwork of Narrative Science, a start-up in Evanston, Ill., that offers proof of the progress of artificial intelligence — the ability of computers to mimic human reasoning.

The company’s software takes data, like that from sports statistics, company financial reports and housing starts and sales, and turns it into articles. For years, programmers have experimented with software that wrote such articles, typically for sports events, but these efforts had a formulaic, fill-in-the-blank style. They read as if a machine wrote them.

But Narrative Science is based on more than a decade of research, led by two of the company’s founders, Kris Hammond and Larry Birnbaum, co-directors of the Intelligent Information Laboratory at Northwestern University, which holds a stake in the company. And the articles produced by Narrative Science are different.

(...)

Experts in artificial intelligence and language are also impressed, if less enthralled. Oren Etzioni, a computer scientist at the University of Washington, says, “The quality of the narrative produced was quite good,” as if written by a human, if not an accomplished wordsmith. Narrative Science, Mr. Etzioni says, points to a larger trend in computing of “the increasing sophistication in automatic language understanding and, now, language generation.”

The innovative work at Narrative Science raises the broader issue of whether such applications of artificial intelligence will mainly assist human workers or replace them. Technology is already undermining the economics of traditional journalism. Online advertising, while on the rise, has not offset the decline in print advertising. But will “robot journalists” replace flesh-and-blood journalists in newsrooms?

(...)

You can read the full article here.

I went to the homepage of the company that has developed the software, and we can found there:

We Turn Data Into Stories

Narrative Science transforms data into high-quality editorial content. Our technology application generates news stories, industry reports, headlines and more — at scale and without human authoring or editing. Narratives can be created from almost any data set, be it numbers or text, structured or unstructured.

Whether you maintain your own proprietary database, or cover subjects supported by broadly available data including public data sources, our technology cost-effectively turns facts and figures into compelling stories in real time.

Narrative Science delivers:

• Long & short form articles, headlines, business reports, summaries & more
• Customized formats, voices & points-of-view
• All original & optimized content
• Scalable coverage for niche & local markets

What do you think about this? I believe the computer will never be able to reproduce good human writing, but I'm not so sure they can not reproduce "normal, usual" writing made by some humans, without any creativity, that we can find on many media...

[hellnoire]

Well, Cleverbot did pass the Turing test, though with a rigged version. Over 50% of the people tested thought they were talking to a real person.

Mind you, like I said, rigged version. The version they used polled for a good possible response 42 times. The normal Cleverbot? Only 3.

[leofelix]

is it able to rewrite the Divine Commedy? : p

[JayCub]

Thank you Paf for the article and Hellnoire for the additional information.

Anybody remember getting the Comodore console to speak phonetically, sounded like a Dalek with a low battery

[Bearcat]

This reminds me of a song by Zager & Evans called "In the year 2525" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhNM2K8cmU8

but I'm not so sure they can not reproduce "normal, usual" writing made by some humans, without any creativity,

I think at this time you are right Paf, but what will happen in the future does give one pause for thought. Thanks for posting this interesting article.