Last Year it was a Critique

"Arianna's House of Games was, is, and ever shall be an exercise in raw capitalist scammery dressed up in the best fair-market cotton Che tee-shirt money can buy, and once I had satisfied my morbid curiosity -- once I learned exactly how the simple, mechanical aggregation magic trick worked by doing it for a couple of weeks and once I had sussed out the 25 or so words which are in constant, Batman-Splat!-Pow!-Zowie! rotation inside the headline extruding algorithm -- I lost interest."

driftglass, November 2011

In January, it was a joke.

"I know a guy who knows the guy David Brooks hired to write the algorithm that extrudes his "column" twice a week.


"The fifth of gin he burn through every day does nothing to ease his fear that he may have destroyed Western Civilization."

driftglass, January 2012

Now it's an article in Wired (which, oddly, even includes the very unusual choice of the word "extrude" :-)

Can an Algorithm Write a Better News Story Than a Human Reporter?

By Steven Levy Email Author April 24, 2012

Had Narrative Science — a company that trains computers to write news stories—created this piece, it probably would not mention that the company’s Chicago headquarters lie only a long baseball toss from the Tribune newspaper building. Nor would it dwell on the fact that this potentially job-killing technology was incubated in part at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications. Those ironies are obvious to a human. But not to a computer.

At least not yet.

For now consider this: Every 30 seconds or so, the algorithmic bull pen of Narrative Science, a 30-person company occupying a large room on the fringes of the Chicago Loop, extrudes a story whose very byline is a question of philosophical inquiry.
...

Somewhere out there in the Big Dark, the author of "Player Piano"

Player Piano, author Kurt Vonnegut's first novel, was published in 1952. It is a dystopia of automation and capitalism, describing the dereliction they cause in the quality of life. The story takes place in a near-future society that is almost totally mechanized, eliminating the need for human laborers. This widespread mechanization creates conflict between the wealthy upper class—the engineers and managers who keep society running—and the lower class, whose skills and purpose in society have been replaced by machines. The book uses irony and sentimentality, which were to become a hallmark developed further in Vonnegut's later works.

is laughing his head off.

And so it goes.