Sometime in 2009 I was in my car driving in San Francisco and listening to KQED to a program where they we're talking about creativity. One of the guests was a journalist and often wrote articles for magazines. He mentioned that he used a software that he used to help him write. I'm not so sure exactly how it worked but he said it made connections between the meaning of the words he used. At one point he said that he wasn't sure who deserved credit for writing the article, him or the IA. Does anyone know about this or heard something about this? I've combed through websites, KQED, PBS and I've found nothing. Any help finding this article or the names of this software would be greatly appreciated.
I imagine it’s nothing more than a multi layer neural network with a grammar and ontology dictionary behind it. These types of AI simply watch what you write and try to tag along, selecting a possible set of next few sentences based on what you’ve already written. It then waits to see what you write and makes minor adjustments to its internal structure which weigh how likely each possible outcome is. Over thousands of iterations these types of AI can get scarily good at recreating speech, creative content, and flow patterns of actual people.
A few years ago it emerged how certain big newspapers have software which generates news articles (instead of journalists). I don't think it's available outside those newspapers, maybe it's something developed specifically for them. It was quite disappointing to learn that articles are not written by people.
As a programmer, I'm really struggling to believe that. I'm not denying that you read it in what looked like a reliable source, but I'm doubting the source. Any chance that this was about 'articles' rather than news stories? There is software that will take human-written text and "spin" it, taking words and grabbing synonyms from a digital thesaurus, so that they can pretend that it's different content and spread it across a bunch of websites, as ad bait.
Yeah I agree with this. I find it very hard to believe that a program completely writes articles without any human help. Maybe I'm wrong and it is possible, but it seems unlikely to me.
Receptively, no, he was very specific. Rather than some kind of auto correction, it was more like a google search with a related topic.
Mind you this was a show about creativity, it's origins and expression in many forms. This particular point was about authorship, the writer had gained so much from this program and he started question weather more credit needed to be given to this AI for his writing. This was not a topic about AI achieving or replicating human writing, just how it aided in the writing's creativity.
Google "automated journalism", "robo journalism", "Washington post Heliograf", there's an article from BBC, too: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-42858174
