Computer-Generated Content Is Making Good Progress

Well my thoughts are it is that computers can be programmed to do things better than people can in certain applications. They do fall down in some tasks but are improving as they evolve. As for standing around drinking tequila, I will never do that again because of the way it becomes like drinking water but costs much more. Then, everything starts spinning around rapidly like information flowing over the internet. We are teaching computers to communicate more and more. I suspect how we use them will determine our fate.

For what I know the project began 2 years ago at Northwestern U, with Stats Monkey, a software able to write an article about a baseball game by analyzing the score : http://infolab.northwestern.edu/projects/stats-monkey/ 6 million dollars later the software seems able to write a good sport article. If you think about it, any sport has fixed rules, the name of each athlete/player is known, etc. Each sport is a very limited domain, intellectually speaking : nothing looks more at a football article than another football article. With the help of experts and journalists specialized in every sport such a software is possible, but it is a niche and not something that you can generalize to every domain now. Like you said machine translation does not produce a good result, but we have to admit that the result is slightly better every year. After sport journalists, the translators will be probably the next victims of computers in a few year. To achieve it, software will have better parsers and text analysis ; at this level writing tasks will be threatened. Today this NYT article is a sleight of hand.

Interesting. As Topffer noted above, sports is a very specific niche and (on top of the millions in dvelopment) the company had to spend months training the software - it sounds more like a bigger "put the pieces together and drop in the data" machine than the cheaper ones, at this point. I don't see why computers shouldn't write almost as well as people some day. They'll still need people to create the data, analysis and points of view (until we reach true AI) though. It's a neat toy and a great step forward for this particular technology but it's still a LONG way from mimicking a human in flexibility, critical analysis, personality, variations of style and almost every other part of writing. And by the way, $10 an article for 500 words as a professional journalist (note the word "professional") is extremely low. Pro journalists would want several hundred dollars for that at current rates (unless it's just transcription and stuff).

i don't believe they will. if it would be possible for them to evolve without the human beings, then maybe, but that is not the case. the brains of these computers are the human beings. they dont exist if we are not existent. as to doing nothing and letting the computers do everything, that would be a very boring life.