The robots are back with a vengeance

I know it's been kicked around on these threads before but the sports writing robots made another guest appearance, this time in this week's Steve Rushin piece in SI.

Should sports writers begin building our own robots to fend off the sports writing robots?

 

Look, the place where I work uses people to write abstracts of scholarly periodicals. It's writing FOR machines, as the use of keywords is priority one. This is writing so formulaic as to make AP gamers read like John Barth. And when the company several years ago, and last year, tried to install software which would replace human beings as writers, the result was two costly failures in two test projects.
Rushin's story was pretty funny, but artificial intelligence hasn't gotten that far yet. The English language is not a binary proposition.

 

Yeah I agree. I enjoyed the story and wished he would've elaborated on how the box scores get put into the system (i.e. humans -- which would kind of negate the whole point -- or if they are somehow entered in with no human help).

So far I feel threatened more by penny-pinching newspaper owners (but I may start building my robot anyway just in case). It will be interesting to see when this story is done again in 5 or 10 years if it will ring a different tune.