
Some BBC election result stories were computer-generated - rajeshrajappan
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-50779761
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hanoz
_> How computers wrote_

Hmmm... Googling: "elected as the MP for" "was created using some automation",
reveals very little variation. We're not exactly talking AI powered journalism
here. More mail merge than ML.

Next week: How computers wrote your last electricity bill.

~~~
johnnycab
No 'real' AI/ML journalism is claimed in the article; the meat and potatoes of
the article are provided by Mr. Robert McKenzie, editor of BBC News Labs. It
is probably best to direct your vitriol towards the right source.

 _" None of the stories have any quotations in, none of them have any analysis
of what happened or what the significance is. It is purely a written version
of what has happened based on the data. So that's quite a big downside in
terms of quality of journalism."_

 _However, Mr McKenzie said the BBC was still in the "very early stages of
understanding what audiences want from the technology"._

[https://twitter.com/nicerbloke](https://twitter.com/nicerbloke)

~~~
hanoz
It's hardly vitriol. I just thought that the headline and opening paragraphs (
_" a news story for every constituency... all written by a computer", "the
BBC's biggest test of machine-generated journalism so far", "Each of nearly
700 articles... was checked by a human editor"_) did hint at an AI element and
more variety of composition in the articles than I found there to be.

~~~
lonelappde
The only person who put "I" in it was you.

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grammarxcore
I worked at a startup in 2015 that did something similar. Using an NLP called
Yseop, we wrote sports articles. The team consisted of me on backend, a
journalist writing the Yseop code, a technical writer building the story
trees, and a data scientist building the DBs from a plethora of sports
sources. It's fairly straightforward. Provide enough variation and you don't
lose readers.

Yseop is not cheap, though, and the company went under after massive financial
fraud. The Tribune Network used a fair chunk of our content at the time. I've
been waiting for this to be more common-place.

~~~
jawns
There used to be an online publisher called Associated Content (bought by
Yahoo for $100M in 2010) that used freelancers to write SEO-optimized content.

I realized that I could write some code that would scrape various sources of
financial data and generate articles about stock tickers. Managed to make some
money before the articles got flagged as too similar to each other, but if I
had put a little more effort into differentiating them, I probably could have
made a pretty penny.

~~~
grammarxcore
I think financial data was where the company started. The first vertical I
interacted with was real estate listings. We moved to basketball and then
baseball. Aside from the articles, we sold "list" ads that would pick stats
and throw players in a list. As we built click data, we were able to tune
those lists to popular things.

~~~
seibelj
I heard about this several years ago and became attuned to it. I follow a few
small cap companies and cryptocurrencies with google news alerts, and most of
the articles sound very robotic and just put data in paragraph form. When the
headline is “XYZ up 2.3% today, a 43.9% above average increase” I know it’s
computer generated.

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PeterStuer
"That would never have been possible using humans"

That would have been _more_ _expensive_ using humans.

Factual reporting is fairly trivial to automate. Add some language generation
and you can even make it sound less dry.

More difficult is adding local contextualization and the impact of e.g.
specific local factors that might have had an influence on the vote outcome.

Implying 'the computer' is doing anything here that a dedicated human could
not is just bad communication at best and utter lies at worst.

~~~
M2Ys4U
>"That would never have been possible using humans" > >That would have been
more expensive using humans.

The BBC has a fixed income, if something is too expensive it's functionally
impossible for them to do.

~~~
jlg23
That's something that should be spelt out in the article.

Also, if one has the resources to proofread all articles, how much more
expensive would it have been to have humans write such trivial texts? The data
is there, writing an article like those takes maybe two minutes?

~~~
iudqnolq
And still has to be proofread afterwards?

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pytester
>Voter turnout was down by 3.5 percentage points since the last general
election.

hm, this example they used was my constituency. I walked around for about 15
minutes until I found the entrance because somebody moved the "POLLING
STATION" sign against a wall where it was less clearly visible. I wonder if
that's related :/

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monkeydust
Bloomberg has been running automated stories for a while - all flagged as
automated so you know. Makes sense for company / eco releases but noticed they
are getting more 'editorial' as well with some of newer automated stories.

Good piece by NYT earlier this year diving into some of the details and tech
used.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/05/business/media/artificial...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/05/business/media/artificial-
intelligence-journalism-robots.html)

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Rebelgecko
For stories that are basically just regurgitating easily parsable statistics,
this is going to become more and more common. The LA Times also has an
algorithm that produces a story every time there's a large enough earthquake
reported by the USGS. The byline gives the credit to "Quakebot", although the
disclaimer that the article was auto-generated also credits the person who
wrote the bot's code

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Wowfunhappy
The information in the example story could have been communicated much more
succinctly via some type of (generated) infographic. Or, heck, just a table.

IMO, paragraphs of text are the worst way to communicate this type of data.

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a_band
I guarantee that a computer didn't write this clickbait BBC headline. :-)

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georgeecollins
I read stories about stocks sometimes that I think are computer generated.
They sound like XYZ reported profits up 10% while margins downs 2%. Typical
margins in XYZ corporation's sector are 22%, while XY maintains a margin of
24%.." etc.

Sometimes I think, I could get this information from reading the 10q. Still I
like getting the info in paragraph form. So yay computers.

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jawns
About 10 years ago, as an online editor, I built a similar set of scripts --
we called them one-clicks. You'd click a button, the story would be generated,
and it would be populated into the CMS.

This works really well for mundane, data-driven stories such as lottery
results or surf reports, both of which I built.

There are a bunch of companies, such as Narrative Science, that are doing much
more sophisticated versions of this. You give them the data and they can churn
out a machine-generated recap of a Little League game that reads much like an
MLB story.

But what I think will really be a game changer is personalization for the
reader.

Can you imagine the same story written 10 different ways for 10 reader
personas? Maybe a reader with an education background might get a different
lede than a reader with an interest in politics on a story about a new school
district referendum. Or heck, maybe a Republican reader might get a different
version of a Trump story than a Democrat. (Not that this would necessarily be
a GOOD thing. But imagine the possibilities!)

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ossworkerrights
Content farm generators used to do something similar over 10 years ago.

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pstuart
Most "mainstream media" reports on elections solely on the basis of the
horserace aspect of it. We hear very little about the actual policies proposed
and the arguments for and against them.

I wonder why?

~~~
rvz
> We hear very little about the actual policies proposed and the arguments for
> and against them.

Really? Most "mainstream media" (in the UK) these days have something called
leaders/referendum debates that invite the audience to participate in holding
a leader or debater to account and they and the interviewer both scrutinise
the debaters' policies in their manifestos in great detail.

There were many debates in this General Election and Local Elections and
"that" referendum of 2016 all detailing arguments on both sides. So I believe
the media sometimes does help with removing the contradictions in the actual
policies rather than simply projecting the whole event like a horserace. (No
matter how biased they might be).

