Post by Victoria on Sept 12, 2015 13:24:19 GMT -5
I found this article on the BBC news site interesting and thought you guys might too!
www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-34204052
TL;DR: Computer writes readable news articles about sport and finance.
What do you guys think of this? Do you think computers will ever take over from human journalists? Could they learn to write fiction?
Personally, I think it's kind of neat that computers can do that. I can't see them replacing human journalists altogether, but I suppose they could conceivably become widely used for drafting more formulaic articles, like summaries of sports events where, as the article notes, people are just looking for certain key pieces of information. (I don't have a sporting bone in my body, though, so I could be missing something!) Then humans could take over just to jazz them up a bit before publication. Someone would still have to programme the machine with different structures to keep it interesting, though, and that would be a job for someone with writing skills. If this takes off, maybe writing as a profession will evolve to include teaching machines to write?
As for fiction, I could actually see someone making a programme that could write a novel, albeit a very formulaic one. Certain genres have such narrow "rules" (though of course human writers can and do break them) that I think it's perfectly plausible that a computer could analyse a large sample of them and then create a new one. It wouldn't be very good, but it would technically function as a novel.
I don't have a particular point, I just think this stuff is interesting! What do you think?
www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-34204052
TL;DR: Computer writes readable news articles about sport and finance.
What do you guys think of this? Do you think computers will ever take over from human journalists? Could they learn to write fiction?
Personally, I think it's kind of neat that computers can do that. I can't see them replacing human journalists altogether, but I suppose they could conceivably become widely used for drafting more formulaic articles, like summaries of sports events where, as the article notes, people are just looking for certain key pieces of information. (I don't have a sporting bone in my body, though, so I could be missing something!) Then humans could take over just to jazz them up a bit before publication. Someone would still have to programme the machine with different structures to keep it interesting, though, and that would be a job for someone with writing skills. If this takes off, maybe writing as a profession will evolve to include teaching machines to write?
As for fiction, I could actually see someone making a programme that could write a novel, albeit a very formulaic one. Certain genres have such narrow "rules" (though of course human writers can and do break them) that I think it's perfectly plausible that a computer could analyse a large sample of them and then create a new one. It wouldn't be very good, but it would technically function as a novel.
I don't have a particular point, I just think this stuff is interesting! What do you think?
