It's Only a Matter of Time Before Robots Replace Flyers Beat Writers
Quick, which one of these game recaps (excerpts) was written by a robot?
James Neal tied the game, 2-2, at 14:53 in the third period. But Claude Giroux regained the Flyers’ lead with his 28th goal of the season at 18:45. Just 37 seconds later, the Pens tied it — again — at 3-3 on Kris Letang’s 11th goal of the season, sending the game to overtime.
In OT, Mark Streit beat goalie Marc-Andre Fleury off the rush on a backhander to end it. Streit’s marker was his 10th of the year.
For the Huskies, Shabazz Napier finished with a game-high 25 points and six rebounds. Michigan State closes out the season with a 29-9 record. The Spartans got to the NCAA Tournament as an at-large team after falling to Michigan 69-55 in the Big Ten Tournament. In the regular season, they finished second in the Big Ten with a 12-6 record in conference play.
In making the Elite Eight, Michigan State topped No. 13-seeded Delaware 93-78 in the second round, No. 12-seeded Harvard 80-73 in the third round, and then No. 1-seeded Virginia 61-59 in the Sweet Sixteen.
The answer is B. But I bet you had to think about it. The Michigan State article was written by a robot. The Flyers article was written by Tim Panaccio.
A startup in North Carolina, StatSheet, today is launching a remarkable network of 345 sports sites, one dedicated to each Division 1 college basketball tam in the U.S. For instance, there is a site for the Michigan State Spartans, North Carolina Tar Heels, and Ohio Buckeyes. Every story on each site was written by a robot, or to put it more precisely, by StatSheet’s content algorithms. “The posts are completely auto-generated,” says founder Robbie Allen. “The only human involvement is with creating the algorithms that generate the posts.”
StatSheet started out as basically a stats database for sports junkies. It stores 500 million different stats across most of the major sports. Now, it is taking all of those stats and creating news stories out of them. It has about 20 different types of articles that it generates, from season previews to game recaps. StatSheet might analyze 10,000 data points and 4,000 possible phrases to generate a single story.
Yes! We have finally found Panaccio’s and Sam Carchidi’s replacement– an automated bot!
StatSheet’s new automated news is frighteningly accurate and just as informative as your standard gamer. Though available only for college sports right now, there’s no telling what the future might hold for the technology. I recommend demoing it for CSN in case they decide to replace their highly paid, expense-happy Flyers scriptual, or for the Inquirer, in case they want a beat writer that doesn’t throw completely unfounded innuendo into the ether. This thing has so much potential, and it doesn’t even get mad when it has to pull news from Instagram!
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Side note: A little birdie told me that former Flyers beat writer and AFL China sideline reporter Randy Miller, now of NJ.com, will be covering the Flyers in the playoffs. One last hurrah with the gang before they’re all destroyed by a cyborg! Eat your heart out, Karel Čapek.
