<story><title>Journalism generated by machine is on the rise</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/05/business/media/artificial-intelligence-journalism-robots.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jawns</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m a former journalist and spent the first 10 years of my career at various magazines and newspapers.&lt;p&gt;About eight years ago, I landed my first full-time software development job in part because of a walkthrough I gave during my in-person interview process of a tool I&amp;#x27;d developed while working for a metro daily newspaper.  It wrote lottery results stories with the click of a button.&lt;p&gt;Writing those results stories was a daily chore.  We would look up the state&amp;#x27;s daily lottery results and also report Powerball and Mega Millions results.  For those larger lotteries, we&amp;#x27;d also adjust our headlines depending on whether there was a big winner in our state.  But aside from that, it was just tedious and formulaic, so I wrote a script that would hit the various lottery sites, scrape the data, and generate a two- or three-paragraph story that was ready to post.  It took the task down from five minutes to five seconds.  (I later worked on a similar tool for generating short weather reports and alerts.)&lt;p&gt;Since then, I&amp;#x27;ve worked on other NLG stuff, and honestly, it&amp;#x27;s pretty hard, and the topic really has to be data-driven to begin with; we&amp;#x27;re probably decades away from really insightful NLG that offers &amp;quot;why&amp;quot; explanations, as opposed to &amp;quot;what&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;how&amp;quot; descriptions.&lt;p&gt;The other tough challenge about computer-generated journalism is that getting the data is often the hardest part of the process.  Oh, sure, businesses are going to release their quarterly earnings reports, and sports teams are going to release their game data.  You might even use computer-assisted reporting to generate FOIA requests for data that governments are required by law to release upon request.  But you&amp;#x27;re not going to write a story that leads to Nixon&amp;#x27;s resignation or Enron&amp;#x27;s collapse simply by asking for the data.</text></comment>
<story><title>Journalism generated by machine is on the rise</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/05/business/media/artificial-intelligence-journalism-robots.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>freehunter</author><text>My side project is a local news outlet for two small cities near me. They are small enough cities that I am the only game in town when it comes to digital media, the only competitor is the local newspaper who has no online presence. Plenty of our stories are actual news articles talking about local politics and new businesses&amp;#x2F;restaurants and local interest type stuff, all written by humans.&lt;p&gt;But filling in the gaps is plenty of machine-generated content. One of our big draws is the event calendar, and fortunately events give me enough data to feed an AI that I&amp;#x27;ve developed. There is enough structured data and the information is so routine that this system can churn out several articles per day that sounds hand-written and every article sounds custom tailored to the business and the event itself. This fills in the routine work of keeping content flowing in between the stuff that takes a lot longer to research and write, and makes it viable for us (one full time employee and one part time employee) to run two popular small-town news websites where otherwise no one would even bother trying.&lt;p&gt;This is also a great case where classical AI is still relevant to modern problems. Neural networks just are not good at writing English in a way that humans would enjoy reading. At some point I plan on packaging it up and doing a Show HN, but for the time being, this article is spot on. Machine-generated news content breathes whole new life into an area that&amp;#x27;s increasingly hard to turn a profit.</text></comment>