
Robot Journalism Is Great for Journalists - fraqed
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/07/why-robot-journalism-is-great-for-journalists.html
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danso
"Robot journalism" is good for journalism in the same way that outsourcing is
good for programmers and engineers: drudge code entry that needs to be done
can be identified and contracted out at a much lower rate, therefore saving
the in-house programmers to do innovative, business-expanding work.

However, that reality doesn't always follow, depending on the dynamics of the
business and the forward-thinkingness of management. And this is in
engineering/technical companies that are making viable amounts of money. Will
the managers who run cratering news companies have the same foresight? Not
going to hold my breath.

(note: I fully support the automation of writing/observation of digital
feeds...I'm just skeptical that the journalism industry will apply it either
efficiently or in a way that benefits their human workers)

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keithpeter
_> > "Journalism is becoming a more highly skilled job,” Doctor said. “Simply
showing up, in the Woody Allen sense — being able to read a press release or
interview a single person, and write up a story that is understandable in 750
words — that's not going to be enough."_

Just wondering where these higher skilled journalists are going to learn their
trade? Longer in j-school? So more debt?

The OA was I suspect given routine business reports to write as a cub reporter
to get him used to deadlines, structures, systems, house style &c. Same with
minor league sports reports in provincial newspapers in the UK.

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paletoy
The next attack on journalism might be great curation, not robots. Why ?
because no single human has the capability to write the best story in any
given case.Add to that the capabilities of unpaid bloggers, industry insiders
and the like, you get a serious threat to journalism.

Alas ,there are no great content curation tools AFAIK.But when there will
be...

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lemma
Can you expand on this? What would great curation/curation tools look like? I
feel like I agree with this insight, but don't know much about the field.

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paletoy
Giving you articles that are fun,strongly insightful and 100% right almost
every time, on your exact interests is the goal of a great curation.Bonus
points for short an to the point writeup when appropriate.

How do you do it ? not sure yet. The best that i can do today to do is
constantly weeding out my blogs/twitter subscriptions. But i'm far from that
goal.

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TelmoMenezes
> ... on your exact interests is the goal of a great curation

I am not so sure this is a good idea. It will trap people in bubbles, where
they will find only an echo chamber for their existing opinions and never have
them challenged. It will insulates them from serendipity and it will prevent
them from exploring, acquiring new interests and perspectives and so on.

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chris_va
People keep worrying about filter bubbles, which is a rational but misguided
fear. Having written some of these systems (Google News), it really does not
happen the way people imagine it would.

At the end of the day, the factors that define a good curation framework do
not actually create a filter bubble. People love serendipitously discovering
new content, and the optimizing for the "best article" does not actually
optimize for a singular viewpoint. As a result, any curation system that
produces a filter bubble will not actually feel as good of a system to the end
user, and will not get as much adoption.

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TelmoMenezes
Chris, in my view the problem with this reasoning is that you are assuming
that people are good at noticing that they are inside a filter bubble.

I have a less optimistic perspective: I suspect people want to feel like they
are being exposed to diverse information while not having their beliefs or
preferences challenged. This makes sense, considering that our cognitive
resources are limited and being exposed to information that contradicts our
beliefs is a psychologically painful experience.

So I claim that this is a cultural problem that companies have no incentive to
solve. I am not claiming that I have a solution, nor do I endorse regulation
or (shudder) government intervention on cultural dynamics.

I suspect that we more and more belong to tribes that are divided across
intelectual instead of geographical lines. Surely I have more in common with
you than most of my neighbours (just going by the fact that we are both
participating in the same niche forum). The problem is that nation states are
still geographical and have to arrive at some democratic consensus to avoid
tyranny. The avenues by which such consensus can be achieved are getting
narrower. Maybe we will transcend nations, maybe we will devolve into tyranny.
I am hoping for the former, but become worried when I see people believing
that the problem doesn't exist.

I try do as I preach, so I am open to having my opinion challenged :)

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jusben1369
On a totally different note this startup, Automated Insights, is based in
Durham NC (where my startup Spreedly is also based). There are all the
elements of a great startup scene; a clustering of talent, a decent incubator
that does two sessions per year at around $150K per startup, cheap real
estate, excellent food and affordable living. The greater area has 3 good
schools. There are numerous other startups here but I can't help but give a
plug for what's happening as I know many developers here wrestle with
work/life balance. Right now it's very good in Durham. Biggest drawback is
lack of local seed funding but things like AngelList are making that less of
an issue than a few years ago.

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benologist
Robot journalism isn't going to be great for journalists. Publications will
quickly gravitate towards the content farm model where every article will be
accompanied by 20 - 30 keyword permutations and no overhead for articles that
don't pull social media traffic/shares/links. You can already see companies
like Mashable pushing the limits of doing this by hand.

I wonder if/how Google will differentiate between automated news vs machine-
generated spam?

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xorcist
> I wonder if/how Google will differentiate between automated news vs machine-
> generated spam?

If history is any guide, I think this line will be more and more difficult to
draw.

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chris_va
It's easier than you might think. Machines are, if nothing else, good at
identifying things other machines have created.

People also often forget that Google doesn't just have to look at the page
content to analyze something. Reader behavior, for example, can tell you a
lot.

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xorcist
I'm not so sure about that. Machine curated news could easily be used as base
for spam, for example.

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Houshalter
I don't see how this is useful. It's just converting some short table of
statistics into an unnecessarily long paragraph in natural language.

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hvs
Some people see tables of statistics and think, "AUGH! MATH!" Whereas the same
information presented in natural language does not generate the same response.

I'm also assuming that the software can provide a little more context than
just that sort of opening paragraph. If not, I agree with you that this isn't
exactly earth-shattering software (then again, what is these days?).

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mckoss
Also a better format for text to speech.

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EGreg
Whatever a robot can do, they can do a million times an hour.

Next we'll have robot comments on robot blogs. We already have impersonal
birthday wishes on fb -- where you can make an app that automatically wishes
happy birthday. And the recipient can install an app to automatically thank
everyone. It's as I was half joking in the past -- guys will outsource their
robots to have sex with their wives' robots.

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Houshalter
I wonder if you got a large dataset of these short human written articles, and
trained a generative model to produce them character by character. This was
done on wikipedia:
[https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~ilya/fourth.cgi](https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~ilya/fourth.cgi)

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mkhpalm
Yes, but what about robot sensationalism? Do we have the technology to make
something great for sensationalists?

