Did a Human or a Computer Write This?
Former reporter hear who has been in professional talks with a natural-language generation firm, dabbles in NLP, and has some insight into this process.<p>A lot of what machines churn out is based on templates that humans have created. Many of the things we read that are supposedly written by machines required major human intervention, and the application of strict constraints on the machine so that it wouldn't screw up.<p>Number stories about baseball and the stock market are good for machines to write about. Most qualitative things aren't, for the moment. Even Google's results generating captions from images last November actually included a lot of variance. The algorithm was good at recognizing some things and not others.<p>To the commenters on this thread who criticize news organizations, I would simply ask: Do you consume your news for free? Do you believe that synthesizing complex events using multiple sources of data happens without cost? Do you believe that news organizations pay reporters much to write stories? Please reflect on your role in the news ecosystem.<p>Most readers today are free riders, and unwilling to subsidize quality journalism. That's one reason why it's dying.