The dream, if that’s what it is, of machines writing in the manner of humans is not a new one. It’s difficult to imagine a time when computers can give us anything beyond basic, templated prose, but perhaps that’s not the point. Maybe each of us will have a robot collecting and writing simple and personalized information for us, the long tail taken to its extreme conclusion. That could be helpful or it might encourage us all to be nations of one. From Klint Finley at Wired:

Is anyone actually reading any of this machine generated content? Automated Insights CEO Robbie Allen says that’s the wrong question to ask. Although the company generated over one billion pieces of content in 2014 alone, most of this verbiage isn’t meant for a mass audience. Rather, Wordsmith is acting as a sort of personal data scientist, sifting through reams of data that might otherwise go un-analyzed and creating custom reports that often have an audience of one.

For example, the company generates Fantasy Football game summaries for millions of Yahoo users each day during the Fantasy Football season, and it helps companies turn confusing spreadsheets into short, human readable reports. One day you might even have your own personal robot journalist, filing daily stories just for you on your fitness tracking data and your personal finances.

“We sort of flip the traditional content creation model on its head,” he says. “Instead of one story with a million page view, we’ll have a million stories with one page view each.”•