<story><title>In Case You Wondered, a Real Human Wrote This Column</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/business/computer-generated-articles-are-gaining-traction.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jellicle</author><text>What this article doesn&apos;t tell you is that the human who wrote it works for Narrative Science.&lt;p&gt;For those who don&apos;t know, if you see a story in your local paper, and it doesn&apos;t involve a car crash, crime, weather, or sports, it was probably placed there by a PR representative.  Most of the things you read are not the result of random reporters deciding to cover X or Y, but a paid, concerted effort to place story X or Y in the paper by providing the paper with a fully pre-digested story to perhaps rewrite, or perhaps not.&lt;p&gt;The words &quot;narrative science&quot; appear 14 times in that story, including such clunkers as &quot;To generate story “angles,” explains Mr. Hammond of Narrative Science....&quot; when Mr. Hammond has already been introduced earlier in the story.  It even includes pricing: hey readers, this is not only cool and will win the Pulitzer Prize, but it&apos;s cheap too!  No mention of competitors...  It reads like an ad because it is an ad.&lt;p&gt;This story was provided, probably almost word for word, by a PR person to the NYT reporter.&lt;p&gt;I&apos;m not sure if computer-generated text will be better or worse than the media system we have now.</text></comment>
<story><title>In Case You Wondered, a Real Human Wrote This Column</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/business/computer-generated-articles-are-gaining-traction.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>talbina</author><text>Did they write an entire two page article while ignoring the real leader in this space, in my opinion: &lt;a href=&quot;http://statsheet.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://statsheet.com/&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>