Comments

1
I can't tell the difference between the current content farmers from Huffpo and a rudimentary bot anyway.
2
Sorry, Eli, your work is no longer needed; we've got a computer.

I can't articulate my thoughts on this, but I feel so sad now.

Thanks, Cienna. It had been such a beautiful morning.
3
Sorry, I don't welcome our new robot overlords of journalism. No matter how advanced "narrative science" becomes.

Sometimes I wonder just what the fuck will be left for humans to actually be doing in the year 2060. Y ou think we'll be Living the good life in a robot-created hedonistic utopia, sitting around sipping perfectly mixed drinks and listening to robots read robot-written novels?

No, we still live under the long shadows of capitalism, and considering how the average American seems to less and less intelligent over time, and the increasingly omnipresence of entertainment, it's likely we will always choose to remain enslaved. This means more so called "white collar" work will become "unnecessary" and the former practitioners can join the rest of the unemployed underclass until we're all down there in the dogpile. Maybe I'm being a bit luddite and reactionary, but, really, where does all of this end? Will any work by real humans be of any value two or three generations from now, once the work of robots is indistinguishable from the work of humans? This is the sort of doomsday scenario that keeps me awake at night.
4
Legally, you're not supposed to report a story like this without the phrase "IN THE WORLD OF TOMORROW". The computer would know that.
5
One of the lines from 1984 that really stuck with me for some reason is "Machines write novels, but horses draw plows."

Since this memory is a few decades old, I'm sure it's a misquote, something a computer would never do.
6
This is a good step toward AI, methinks.
7
Naw. I think the future of jounalism will look more like the depiction in Sleep Dealer. Video-based stories sold P2P, as a form of intimate story telling. I don't think Skynet could pull that off.
8
Writing?

Or editing?

Writing I could believe. News aggregators basically just do zero work and repackage press releases.

But editing?

That's a skill.
9
Please can you have a corner in the office where you actually create the computer you speak of? I will contribute at least $5 to make it a reality.

It needs a name. Strange-u-tron 5000?
10
@5, the first thing that came to my mind while reading this was "1984" as well.
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
11
@9: Adrianna Huffington's already engaged it at AOL corp.
12
@10, the first thing that came to my mind was "Will in Seattle"

Imagine the gems of wisdom that might be produced by such an algorithm.
13
I would like to buy one of those Macs mentioned in the last paragraph.
14
@8

In all seriousness (from having written a number of narrative engines), Will is right on here.

Editing is the trick.

However, I believe that editing will be crowd-sourced or piece-worked. Or, perhaps just another algo for 'preference-based' or 'profile-based' aggregation against a generated narrative.

e.g. A Millon Monkeys at typewriters, check.
Ten million iphone users getting paid 0.09 per day to 'like' or 'not like' or 'edit' some crap that a database spit out of our linguistic ancestry; that's coming tomorrow.


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