The idea that machines can write narratives is nothing new, and I suspect that broad screenplays could be produced by algorithms right now or in the near future. Popular books and reportage written with a human level of nuance by bots is a harder trick to pull off, though it probably will be possible given enough time. Not that I’m looking forward to that. From Jason Dorrier at Singularity Hub:

The idea that computers are increasingly taking figurative pen to paper has recently attracted quite a bit of attention. Over the last few years, algorithmic news writing has begun quietly infiltrating big name journalism.

Last year a Los Angeles Times algorithm was first to break the news of a mild quake that hit LA in the early morning hours. And one of the best known algorithms, by Narrative Science, is used by a number of news outlets, including Forbes.

These robot writers are fairly limited and highly formulaic (to date). For the most part, they excel at what might be called data-centric journalism—sports, finance, weather. Basically anything that generates statistics and spreadsheets.

The bots peruse the data, looking for outliers, maximums, minimums, and averages. They take the most newsworthy of these statistics, come up with an angle and story structure—choosing from an internal database—and spit out the final text.

The result is simple but effective, and on a quick read, perfectly human.

It’s tempting to look ahead a few years and forecast a news media dominated by algorithmic writing. Narrative Science’s Kristian Hammond says computers might write Pulitzer-worthy stories by 2017 and generate 90% of the news by 2030.

He might be right. But the software will need to be more capable than it is now. In fact, computers have been similarly constructing algorithmic sentences since 1952. A machine from that era, the Ferranti Mark 1, constructed love letters from a static list of words, a very simple version of the way modern newsbots build articles from preprogrammed phrases.”•