Minor League Baseball reports by the Associated Press are written by machines

By Bruce Brown July 2, 2016

ap uses ai for sports writing baseball pitcher — Aspen Photo / Shutterstock

Wondering when “the machines” will take over? Anyone who writes for a living, or those considering it, should consider this a heads up. The Associated Press is using machine-generated stories to cover baseball, according to Venture Beat. The reports and stories aren’t for major league teams, but they do expand the AP’s minor league coverage without deploying (and paying for) additional journalists to attend and write about the games.

The AP has already been using financial reporting from Automated Insights, an artificial intelligence company. The Durham, North Carolina firm employs algorithms in a platform called Wordsmith A.I. to “transform raw data into actionable stories and insights,” Venture Beat reported two years ago. The Associated Press also backed the firm financially in 2014.

Related Videos

Automated Insights uses data about the minor leagues from a separate news, game, and player statistics company, Major League Baseball Advanced Media (MLBAM). The raw statistics are converted into sentences that describe and analyze games.

In an example of an Automated Insight-generated story from a recent game between the State College Spikes and the Brooklyn Cyclones, copy about individual player performance and overall game analysis reads naturally. “Dylan Tice was hit by a pitch with the bases loaded with one out in the 11th inning, giving the State College Spikes a 9-8 victory over the Brooklyn Cyclones on Wednesday,” the story opens.

In another example, the “machine” put the game results in a larger perspective, “Despite the loss, six players for Brooklyn picked up at least a pair of hits. Brosher homered and singled twice, driving home four runs and scoring a couple. The Cyclones also recorded a season-high 14 base hits.”

Venture Beat reported that Automated Insights’ Wordsmith generates other copy covering e-commerce and real estate, as well as sports and financial transactions. Another sign that the AP is going forward with machine-based writing is the hiring of its first automation editor. The AP said at the time it “has committed to ‘explore additional automation technology solutions’ in conjunction with Automated Insights.”

Editors' Recommendations

Topics

News

Clearview AI’s facial-recognition app is a nightmare for stalking victims

Facial Recognition Composite

The latest example of Silicon Valley's hubris is the facial-recognition app Clearview AI. The small startup's app is so powerful that someone could walk up to you on the street, snap your photo, and quickly find out your name, address, and phone number, according to a report in The New York Times.

This technology probably sounds like a great idea to two types of people: Law enforcement and creeps. Advocates worry this kind of facial-recognition technology could be a boon to stalkers, people with a history of domestic abuse, and anyone else who would want to find out everything about you for a nefarious purpose.

Emerging Tech

Surveillance on steroids: How A.I. is making Big Brother bigger and brainier

ai taking facial recognition next level skylark labs plaza post detection

It’s no big secret that we live in a surveillance state. The average American is caught on CCTV camera an estimated 75 times a day. Meanwhile an average Londoner, the world’s most photographed person, is snapped on public and private security cameras an estimated 300 times every 24 hours.

But if you thought that the future was just more cameras in more places, you’d better think again. Thanks to breakthroughs in fields like computer vision, tomorrow’s surveillance society is going to be a whole lot more advanced. The amount of information which can be extracted from video footage is increasing all the time. As a result, instead of simply static recordings made for future reference, or live feeds viewed by bored workers watching banks of monitors at the same time, CCTV is getting smarter. Way smarter. I'm talking multiple orders of magnitude smarter, and a whole lot more mobile, too.
The eye in the sky
One such new technology, the so-called Aerial Suspicious Analysis (ASANA), is the work of computer vision company Skylark Labs. ASANA is a drone-based security system, designed to spot suspicious activity in crowds of hundreds of people from anywhere between 10 feet and 300 feet. Drones equipped with its cloud-based technology can hover over large gatherings of people and accurately identify behavior such as fighting, kicking, stabbing, fighting with weapons, and more. That’s alongside non-suspicious activities like high-fiving, dancing, and hugging, used to make the system more robust to false alerts. The system is also being modified to spot suspicious objects, such as unattended bags. Alerts can then be sent to the relevant authorities.

Emerging Tech

Bot or not? This browser extension will identify text written by A.I.

will computers revolt preparing for the future of ai ex machina xxl

Figuring out whether the things you read on the internet are true can be challenging. Thanks to a new web plug-in, determining whether stories were written by a human or an A.I. is now a whole lot easier. GPTrue or False is a browser extension for Chrome and Firefox that lets users select text on a website (50 words and more) and have it evaluated to determine the likelihood that it was written by OpenAI's GPT-2 A.I. model rather than a human.

GPT-2 is a text-generating algorithm that allows users to seed it with the start of a piece of text, such as an article from a newspaper, and then dreams up the rest in terrifyingly convincing fashion. While some have used it for creative purposes, such as generating ever-changing text adventure games, others are rightfully concerned about what it could mean for the spread of fake news.