On: More News Is Being Written By Robots

[pantalaimon]

- In a recent example, an LA Times writer-bot wrote and posted a snippet about an earthquake three minutes after the event.

- The LA Times claims they were first to publish anything on the quake, and outside the USGS, they probably were.

- The LA Times example isn’t special because it’s the first algorithm to write a story on a major news site.

- Indeed, Kristian Hammond, cofounder and CTO of Narrative Science, thinks some 90% of the news could be written by computers by 2030.

- The LA Times earthquake story, written by an algorithm created by one of their staff, included a disclaimer.

This TL;DR was written by a bot.

http://www.textteaser.com/s/Y4TWuU

[shubb → pantalaimon]

An opensource bot - https://github.com/MojoJolo/textteaser/

[Pitarou → pantalaimon]

And the bot doesn't get the details wrong!

I mistakenly wrote "Bill Hammond" instead of "Kristian Hammond" in my TL;DR. (Sorry Kristian.)

[higherpurpose → Pitarou]

But it could still have bias.

[sosborn → higherpurpose]

Everything is subject to bias.