An Algorithm May Soon Cover Your Local Sports Team (vice.com) 53
Sam Edwards, writing for Motherboard: A Spanish startup is promising to revolutionize readers' access to often unreported news. The unreported news in question, however, is not overlooked disasters or under-reported tragedies in far-flung countries, but minor league sporting events. David Llorente, co-founder of Narrativa, said was inspired to develop an AI-powered content generation system after he tried fruitlessly to find coverage of minor league soccer games from other countries in his native Spanish. "There are people interested in these things, in these leagues, in these kind of sports," he told Motherboard. "The idea was to focus on regional sports. I wanted to write about football, but about Japanese football in Spanish, to cover this niche." Sevilla won with a resounding 20 against Athletic in Nervion, where the sum up eight straight wins at home. Gameiro scored the first one for the locals and closed the scoreboard by converting a penalty kick after Kychowiak was fouled. Athletic was unlucky despite controlling ball possession and wasn't able to finish any of the numerous chances that they had. -- Narrativa game summary.
Narrativa is part of the booming automatic content generation industry which uses algorithms to convert data sets into narratives. Related: How a robot wrote for Engadget.
Narrativa is part of the booming automatic content generation industry which uses algorithms to convert data sets into narratives. Related: How a robot wrote for Engadget.
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Why did I get modded down? The English translation sucks. Did someone think I was being prejudiced or something?
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Just wait for the AI to not detect trolls.
Derek Jeter on the trading block to the Xatalal Bats???
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versus the Toledo Mud Hens?
Babel II, here we come! (Score:2)
You won't BELIEVE what happens NEXT!
KITTENS after the break
Learn about Obama's program to refinance you latte, banks hate it!
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Sports are entertainment not news
News are entertainment not news
FTFY.
How 'bout: News are entertainment. Full stop.
Seriously -- news is mostly entertainment and has been throughout history. Back in the day, you used to have "one stop shopping" for your entertainment in your wandering bard.
The bard was part pop singer, part storyteller, part news reporter ("Have you heard about the plague that has hit far in the east? Or the new queen in the north?"), and part random showman.
Nowadays, we've split these tasks up -- the pop singers are self-explanatory, the storytellers
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Go sports team! (Score:2, Funny)
Go sports team! Do the sports good and beat the opposing sports team!
Another art made useless (Score:2)
Once again, sports -- and by extension sports commentary -- is a form of artistic expression (outside of the business of sports, of course). If an algorithm can give me the commentary, then I'm not interested in that commentary at all. It doesn't express a human-art, and therefore it contributes nothing of value to my day.
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I'd say there's art in telling (some) stories, even if the listener has heard it before. YMMV which ones are interesting. Helps if you have emotional investment in one of the teams, whether there's any point to it or not.
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My point is that in those cases, it's the "telling" that's art, not the "hearing". When an algorithm does the telling, there's no art left.
I really don't care about what a computer has to say about a game. For that reason, I'm not interested in hearing it.
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I'd argue there's an art in designing the algorithm. At least I'd hope so, since I've got a hobby project involving algorithmic writing. I might be biased.
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Oh, certainly. But that's for the documentary on how-it's-made, not for the consumer listening to it.
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I'd argue there's an art in designing the algorithm.
I doubt if there is any art in it. You just take the statistics of a zillion sports games, and the articles written about them by humans, and shove it into a ML system. Then cycle through them until the system learns to generate reasonable articles from the data.
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Well, perhaps you forgot that just last week, Facebook's AI picked up a fake news report & ran it as real news. Just days after they fired their human editors.
So, there's all kinds of hilarity to be expected.
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Once again, sports -- and by extension sports commentary -- is a form of artistic expression (outside of the business of sports, of course). If an algorithm can give me the commentary, then I'm not interested in that commentary at all. It doesn't express a human-art, and therefore it contributes nothing of value to my day.
I wouldn't expect to be uplifted by the soaring prose of a minor-league sports report, unless they've singled out an exceptional minor-league game, which is a different goal from this project. For run-of-the-mill sports reporting, doesn't most of the "art" consist of identifying important or unusual details of the game -- which play changed the momentum from one team to another, which player(s) performed better or got more playtime than they usually do, how well or poorly the great player(s) performed? That
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Who said anything about a sample size of one game? AI can "remember" the details of every game, and identify how this game is different from others. Think of it as an "anomaly reporter", which is a lot of what people want from a sports report. That's well within the abilities of an AI. Even momentum is discernible by AI, arguably better than a human. If one team had unusually good performance during a certain span of time, that's "momentum". Sure, humans can spot patterns like this (or sometimes false patte
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It's a big GIGO process where we don't even have a good idea of what garbage we're putting in. Don't expect AI to magically fix it.
You are basically arguing that human-written stories of this ilk are baseless and AI-written stories will be no better. I agree, but I would say an AI system can probably do this job as well as a person, and for less money. So an AI system could satisfy people who want to read stories about "momentum" or unusual performance, even though those are often just apparent patterns in the noise. You are not in that group of readers and neither am I, but that doesn't mean the AI is ill-suited to this job. And for m
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But that's exactly what makes it an art. It's about choosing which 80%, which 19.999%, and which 0.001%. That's the expression.
This is slashdot. Every week we read another "high school class sends camera into space for under $100, gets photos as good as nasa" article. But that high school class got 100 random photos, once. Nasa gets the photo they wanted, of the object they wanted.
It's the very selection that's the art.
So basically the Football Manager games (Score:2)
I'm ashamed at how many hours I wasted on the 2012 version of that. It was pretty good at algorithmic descriptions most of the time, but its stockpile of phrases during matches left a lot to be decided. I shouldn't see "He puts the ball in row Z!!" several times a match, especially when someone just barely gets a ball into the stands. Oh well.
I keep thinking "This year's version will be better", then remembering the life I got back when I stopped playing.
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...left a lot to be desired. Sure does take a long time to wake up after a three day weekend.
Do not want (Score:2)
"Soon" as in "4 years ago"? (Score:2)
Pretty sure Narrative Science has been doing this since 2012 [wired.com]. At least for Little League.
Also, their competitor Automated Insights offered API access to small parties last year [wired.com]. Maybe "local sports" is too big?
Maybe this is new for Spain?
Regardless, seems like entry level writing positions are going to be more difficult to come by, at least for humans.
AI and Stakes (Score:2)
A resounding 20? (Score:1)
What will retired althetes do now? (Score:2)
I like formula 1 (Score:3)
Easy for my favourite sport:
while ( stillRacing )
{
printf( "Hamilton is 1st, Rosberg is 2nd, Button is nowhere to be seen\n" );
sleep( 10 );
}
printf( "Hamilton won\n" );
blah (Score:2)
If an algorithm can produce the commentary, then a format more orderly than paragraphs of text (e.g., a box score) will convey that same information better.
Most things said and written about sports are vapid by Sturgeon's Law.
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Most things said and written about sports are vapid by Sturgeon's Law.
I think it depends on the context. A lot of sports reporting is high level fluff that can probably be automated. But my chosen code, I follow ex-players and coaches who get semi-privileged information directly from their peers they used to share the locker room with. They also have insight into the nuances a desk journalist or robot just can't cover.
So there is an evolution there. General results will be covered by robots, but if you want the gritty emotional details you'll still need a human.
All your sports are belong to us (Score:2)
And it doesn't seem worse than any other method.
In fact, ESPN seems to be doing this already - in NFL news their regional, conference, and team news spews regularly take on the same flavor, for instance, a topic of 'Top Five Special Teamers' or something similarly predictable and generic will pop up, especially in the off-season when there is, in fact, a lack of 24 hour cycle news.
Blah. The spew is already robotic. Just dispense with the meat robots.
Niche market (Score:1)