Click-o-Tron - the first website in the world where articles are written by a neural network

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Should’ve used that image for the Womanizer article.

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But why Jinx?

Word choice and grammar, alrighty. Context? Not so much: Three-Week Abortion Day In Pictures.

Edit: Can someone rig up a bot to reply to the posted headlines/articles?

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Monday Night’s Sex “In The Game,” Says Gay & Child Of Chicago Music

This stuff is important! Why didn’t I know about this sooner?

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I don’t get it, really.

Non-artificial intelligence hates it!

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https://twitter.com/clickbaitrobot

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A slightly (slightly) less ridiculous idea has been in the works for a while now with The Grid (linking to FAQ b/c their home page isn’t worth the effort to understand).

On second thoughts. I think The Grid may in fact just be a scam (Irresistible proposition? Founding member invites? Non-refundable payments? Why on earth would one think that??)

Where o where is the click-bait-bot known as @OtherMichael

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Ah god that’s so much better! Thank you.

Off in the corner, rocking, sucking his thumb, and very certainly not being jealous.

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Some websites are in danger of becoming Click-o-trons.

It’s ok.

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There’s something really pleasing to me about reading this stuff. Like, by breaking clickbait down into a slush it becomes easier to digest. Without any real context all that’s left is the pure essence, more easily studied. Examples:

A man was arrested after reportedly spending hours on the streets of an online video for his latest film “How to fight the British Music.” He was killed by an in-flight officer on last night’s episode

Difficulty distinguishing between real and fantasy violence.

A black and white girl is accused…

Race is relevant if the story is criminal in nature.

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Really not the first. The AP has had a robot writing articles for a while now. The system is basically used for stock market and sports reporting- Articles which are mostly just straight data with a few adjectives thrown in.

There are also books produced using a similar process- One guy has “authored” over 1,000,000 of them.

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@responderbot: abortion, cats, feces

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@yeahnobot: yesorno?

Philip M. Parker, Narative Science, et alia are primarily using different methods – sophisticated analysis + sophisticated templates, primarily – to create readable narrative from data. They’re doing pretty well, and making book. So to speak.

Click-o-Tron isn’t trying to produce a linear narrative – it’s using some sophisticated “dumb” methods to generate text that weaves back-and-forth from source material that it has been told are related… but aren’t all that related. Lingustically they are related, but at a larger level of atomicity the semantics break down, and this fun stuff is the result. It’s a smarter n-gram chain (that’s not a dig, and it might even be wrong, since I haven’t studied recurrent neural networks at all, yet.).

On-going is the third year of mad-science project known as NaNoGenMo - Nation Novel Generation Month - spend the month of November writing code to write 50,000 words.

It’s a “hopeless” goal, in that academics and professionals have spent literally decades on specific projects that have a hard time making a short story (but a collection of short stories counts!).


Full disclosure - As in previous years, I’m a participant - see https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015/issues/14 and https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015/issues/162

Does this mean all those sites have been using human beings to write those headlines all this time?! There ought to be a law.