Can the Computers Replace Paid Writers?

The Atlantic wrote Can the Computers at Narrative Science Replace Paid Writers?. "Now computers have proven competence—no, fluency—in yet another aspect of human life: writing. Narrative Science, a Chicago-based startup, has developed an innovative platform that writes reported articles in eerily humanlike cadence. Their early work focused on niche markets, clients with repetitive storylines and loads of numeric data—sports stories, say, or financial reports. But the underlying logic that drives the process—scan a data set, detect significance, and tell a story based on facts—is powerful and vastly applicable. Wherever there is data, Narrative Science founders say, their software can generate a prose analysis that's robust, reliable, and readable."

I'm a bit doubtful.

This reminded me of the unsummarize hack from ADHOC 2004: "Lastly, winning the first ADHOC Showcase was Jorg Brown's Unsummarize, a clever bit of code that takes a short sentence or phrase and "expands" it in the reverse of the way Apple's Summarize service works (select text in a Services-aware application then choose Services > Summarize from the application menu). Unsummarize works (perhaps with some smoke and mirrors for the demo) by performing a Web search using the selected text and using the search results as the expansion. Jorg got the idea for Unsummarize from a joke David Pogue made during the ADHOC keynote about how Summarize was cool, but he'd really like something that went the other direction so the Mac could write his articles for him."