Replacing Sports Bloggers With an Algorithm 120
tesmar tips a report up at TechCrunch that begins "Here come the robo sports journalists. While people in the media biz worry about content mills like Demand Media and Associated Content spitting out endless SEO-targeted articles written by low-paid Internet writers, at least those articles are still written by humans. We may no longer need the humans, at least for data-driven stories. A startup in North Carolina, StatSheet, today is launching a remarkable network of 345 sports sites, one dedicated to each Division 1 college basketball team in the US. For instance, there is a site for the Michigan State Spartans, North Carolina Tar Heels, and Ohio Buckeyes. Every story on each site was written by a robot, or to put it more precisely, by StatSheet's content algorithms. 'The posts are completely auto-generated,' says founder Robbie Allen. 'The only human involvement is with creating the algorithms that generate the posts.'"
Close, but still not pratical (Score:4, Interesting)
Not bad... (Score:5, Interesting)
I've read a couple articles and they are no worse than the SEO-targeted content written by freelancers odesk for $2/hr (and english as a second or third language).
Seems as though the "algorithm" is quite elaborate - taking into account odds of winning as well. Lines such as "The [team] was not supposed to win this game, but made it happen" and combined player statistics "Coming off a poorly put together team last year, this year, the [team] looks to have greater talent."
It reminds me of how someone in Junior high would write. Impressive. Similar to MIT's paper generator: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2005/paper.html [mit.edu]
PHP + MySQL + Mad Libs for Sports.
Re:Close, but still not pratical (Score:4, Interesting)
I can't imagine anyone using it as an actual replacement for even semi well-written content.
It's a bit uncomfortable to read in spots, but way above the quality of most blogs and nothing you can actually point out as an error. So if they manage not to swamp the sites in ads, and provide good statistics as well, I can't see why they couldn't get a rather large take of the advertising action - large in proportion to the manhours invested in writing articles, that is. It could be very lucrative and if it is - well, say goodbye to a lot of reporters who aren't the primetime writers but just pad out the papers: they're going to be automated away or at best, write the templates for the robowriters.
Impressed (Score:3, Interesting)
I read the first article on the first linked site and I was impressed. I wouldn't have known it was generated by a computer. Even knowing that it was computer-generated, I'd still be happy with the quality for this kind of reporting. Very good.
tiny issue (Score:5, Interesting)
Can you copyright the output of an algorithm? Seriously, copyright requires a creative element...
I like it (Score:2, Interesting)
Now sports editors have something to show novice reporters. "If you can't give me something a whole lot better than this, you're fired".
It's a reminder that standards for every knowledge-based profession are going up every year, driven by the combination of the Internet, globalization, and Moore's Law. And this is just the start of it for journalism.
Re:Close, but still not pratical (Score:3, Interesting)
Lucrative is right. They seem to have garnered 1.3 million dollars in funding for their efforts.
Verb Selection (Score:3, Interesting)
I've always been amused by how sports reporters vary the verb used to describe a win. They can't just keep saying "Team A beat Team B" over and over, so they mix it up, based on how wide the score was. For a win with a small margin, they might say "Detroit edged Ottawa", or "The Rangers slid past the Ducks". For a large margin, perhaps "The Coyotes pummeled the Blues". I give extra credit if the verb matches the subject, as in "So-and-so doused the Flames".
I think it would be a lot of fun to write a program for this.