That news article may have been 'written' by a computer

If you read an online news article like this and think a human—perhaps a fretful, harried, twenty-something journalism graduate—is behind it, you may want to think again.

 

These days, your daily dose of morning news could be written by a computer application.

 

According to a report by the CNN, Narrative Science, a Chicago-based startup technology company has developed a computer program that can churn out news articles using raw data.

 

Now Forbes magazine is using the technology to publish stories in its website, a feat that, according to the New York Times, “impressed” and “enthralled” experts in language and artificial intelligence.

 

Launched in 2010, Narrative Science started as a joint research project between two of Northwestern University’s academic units—the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science and the Medill School of Journalism.

 

Led by professors Larry Birnbaum and Kris Hammond, students at the McCormick Intelligent Information Lab created a software that could write descriptive text using statistics in a baseball game.

 

The result was a technology that can write narratives based from “structured” data like baseball box scores and historical data, such as the competing teams’ previous wins and losses.

 

The technology, named “Stats Monkey,” is now being used by American TV company Big Ten Network for recaps in their coverage of baseball and softball games.

 

Big Ten Network is a collaboration between Fox Networks and the Big Ten Conference, the United States’ oldest collegiate athletic conference.

 

Now Narrative Science has progressed to tackling other data-intensive industries, like financial reports.

 

In fact, courtesy of the software, Narrative Science has earned for itself a byline in Forbes.com, one of the 30 companies that have started to use the technology for their business operations.

 

In a New York Times report, Hammond has projected that a computer program will win a Pulitzer Prize within the next five years—and he will be “damned” if it is not their technology.

 

Journalism experts, however, are “unsettled” at the idea.

 

Society of Professional Journalists Ethics Committee head Kevin Smith said that it would be “hard” for a machine to share—and achieve—that “uniquely human custom of storytelling.”

 

Greg Bowers of the Missouri School of Journalism, meanwhile, say that machines do not have the “same” capacity for story structure, pitch, and emotion. –KG, GMA News