
Google is funding the creation of software that writes local news stories - tokyoSurfer
https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/08/google-is-funding-the-creation-of-software-that-writes-local-news-stories/
======
11thEarlOfMar
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-
showca...](https://www.nystocknews.com/2017/07/05/tesla-inc-tsla-showcases-
what-it-has-to-offer-via-the-technical-chart/)

~~~
semperdark
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.

~~~
fjdlwlv
Yes, finance and sports and weather and other metrics reporting is already
highly automated.

~~~
lspress
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.

------
jimrandomh
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?

~~~
Simon_says
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
> 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.

~~~
Simon_says
That's a tough question, and now I'm not so sure I can defend my opinion. It
just comes from the fact that (today) the output will not be as good as a
human writer. It's disingenuous to pass off a low quality product as a higher
quality product, when it will take my time and attention reading it to
differentiate them based on quality. Think of it in terms of branding and
counterfeiting.

Later, after general AI, I will argue the opposite, that human-written
articles should be labeled as such so I don't waste my time on them. ;)

------
igammarays
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.

------
gumby
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.

------
adorable
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?

------
ams6110
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
I don't think reporters exist in this scenario.

------
downandout
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
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"

------
methodin
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
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
Unless the writer with style is the one training the AI...

------
kronos29296
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.

~~~
tokyoSurfer
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.

~~~
heartbreak
But media companies could already do this with human writers if they wanted
to. Maybe they do?

~~~
tokyoSurfer
It is much easier to fine tune few variables than fine tune human writing.
Thus human writing will be easy to determine which side it is siding to.

------
DanBC
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.

------
mc32
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
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
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
I'm confused. Your first example seems to be adding pointless false
commentary, while the second is adding real information about the person.

~~~
mc32
Right, but that information is irrelevant to the cause, it's there to color
opinion. Accused (not even proven) fraudster, therefore adds to possibility of
fault thru negative association.

~~~
Dylan16807
If it's the most notable bit of public info about the person, go for it. If
they're cherrypicking out of dozens of factoids to make them sounds bad, then
it's a problem. The same headline could be fair or unfair depending on how it
came about.

------
tannhaeuser
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
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.

~~~
lspress
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.

------
speeq
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/vid...](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzhc-N5YynO_shpHhzP2zuw/videos)

I wonder who's behind these and similar channels.

------
endswapper
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
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
Can you tell us more about it?

~~~
PaulHoule
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
So you didn't write about a future event

~~~
catshirt
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".

~~~
PaulHoule
No, a similar set of events happened repeatedly. A group of protesters
assembled at a mall, just the last time, the judge got arrested.

Prior to that the exact same judge would make some statement, as would other
people. People searching for the story about the arrest would get a story
about a previous protest without an arrest and find that everything, except
the arrest itself, was pretty much the same.

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

------
tyingq
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)

------
andy_ppp
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
I am not sure. Do you read news for entertainment, or do you read it for
truth?

~~~
andy_ppp
The algorithm will adapt to your every need.

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

------
kevinphy
A relevant and inspiring project with the statement:

"Only Robot Can Free Information"

[https://medium.com/rosenbridge/only-robot-can-free-
informati...](https://medium.com/rosenbridge/only-robot-can-free-
information-9f4ac3bb0701)

Focusing on building robot for reader instead of news provider would be the
future.

------
divbit
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).

------
cwp
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.

------
calafrax
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.

------
zzalpha
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.

------
mnglkhn2
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
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-r...](https://www.recode.net/2017/7/7/15937436/google-news-media-robots-
automate-writing-local-news-stories)

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

------
em3rgent0rdr
We still haven't solved concerns about computers controlling our news feed,
much less writing our news...

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

~~~
nkozyra
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.

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

------
mtgx
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
Google makes a lot of money

------
apeacox
Welcome to the Ministry of Truth

------
reallydattrue
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.

~~~
OscarTheGrinch
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.

~~~
briholt
This is a naive viewpoint I see pop up a lot. People pushing "fiction" think
it's a "fact" and there's no full-proof way to convince them otherwise or even
perfectly distinguish the two. People will tell you that it's a fact that
vaccines cause autism or Iraq has WMDs or America is a white supremacist
country. In reality, "facts" are linguistic simplifications of reality that
inherently omit information and the distinction of "fact" from "fiction" is
itself a simplistic way to attempt to describe the accuracy of a statement. On
a personal note, the people most convinced that they are pushing facts are the
ones I'm most skeptical of.

~~~
OscarTheGrinch
To insist that all points of view are valid, and that truth is somehow
unknowable is a viewpoint very common in academia.

Using the scientific method, meta-studies and suchlike our species has built
an enormous corpus of knowledge, I'm happy to let that evolving concensus be
the basis of our decisions.

For example the fact that vaccines do a more good than harm by an order of
magnitude is no longer up for debate. There is a lunatic fringe who disagree,
their unfounded fiction should not be shown to curious first time parents on
google.

To insist that everyone can pick and choose reality and that we should all be
wary of "facts" is to cause real harm.

~~~
briholt
You're bringing up the other extreme (postmodernism), which I wouldn't agree
with either. I'm arguing against certainty. We are stumbling along trying to
communicate information as accurately as we can in order to produce predicted
outcomes we deem desirable. Hopefully the evidence on an issue becomes so
overwhelming that we can broadly reach a reasonable consensus. However, that
consensus is subjective and dynamic. There is no objective process that will
perfectly delineate "fact" from "fiction" as our Google News overlords would
have you believe.

