Automatic writing

http://education.guardian.co.uk/egweekly/story/0,,2252153,00.html

by edu • 18 years ago

14 7 18 years ago

education.guardian.co.uk

nirmal• 18 years ago

The book titles mentioned in the article seem to be really facts oriented. The act of listing facts is the easiest part of writing anything, in my opinion. I would like to see a machine that could put something together like an Isaacson's biography on Einstein. List the facts of his life but then also draw out the way in which they interplayed with the world politics to lead him down the path he took.

Or maybe, I'm completely mistaken and all we need is to somehow better model this in the machine's database.

henning• 18 years ago

The books are pretty much like glorified reports.

The only material that can be produced are ones that are so devoid of human judgment and editorial input that a computer could do them.

byrneseyeview• 18 years ago

Some Bloomberg stories are written this way. That's how they can have five paragraphs of analysis and a couple relevant quotes three seconds after new economic data are reported. Their profiles, and articles about stories rather than numbers, are done the usual way, though.

DXL• 18 years ago

Here's a video of how Parker does it: http://youtube.com/watch?v=SkS5PkHQphY

The writing is mostly VB Word macros, but impressing still.

D_T• 18 years ago

When I read this I was laughing. But the Guardian is not The Onion so...

almost• 18 years ago

Um, this really seems like complete and utter bullshit. More so after seeing the youtube video.

kcl• 18 years ago

The idea is genius, the act itself, when it isn't explained to the consumer, is completely immoral.

I'm reminded of the "Your Family's Geneaology Book", where "Your Family" is replaced with your last name. For instance, "The Smith's Geneaology Book". The books, which aren't cheap, are full of generic content about cultures and countries. Inserted in the middle is perhaps a page of surname-relevant scholarship. One of my uncles with a different last name has one, and his didn't come with any surname specific material at all: just a printout in the back of people in the US sharing his name.

They've been selling these since before the internet was around, and as a kid they were my first introduction to this type of content-free marketing.

Automatic writing

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