Oh boy! A new company, Narrative Science, from Evanston, Illinois, is offering machine-generated content writing. Companies who don’t really want to bother having a meaningful online conversation with their prospective customers must be jumping for joy. (I’d post Narrative’s website, but there’s no content on it!! Seriously, none!)
For now, the company offers solutions for businesses who work in data-rich areas, like sports. They take in the data from the day’s game and can spit out copy in short order that, apparently, doesn’t sound half bad. The company claims they need no human author and no human editing. One of those involved in the company calls it the “Stats Monkey,” a telling nickname. Fox is using the service this spring for its website coverage of baseball and softball, and there are others. Again, all those mentioned thus far are very data driven.
Stuart Frankel says the product is perfect for stories about crime statistics, medical studies, surveys, financial announcements and more.
Will it really replace writers?
For now, having read several stories about the software, it’s clear that this solution will replace some of the grunt writing in the publishing industry. What will be lacking is meaningful interpretation and critical thinking. Will software be able to analyze a baseball player’s upcoming season based on a recent injury? No way.
This story is getting a good deal of interest in part because it signals a change in the value of the writer’s craft. I’ve written before about the possibility of content writing getting too thin, but my argument is that when something reaches the volume level that writing has on the Internet, it will invariably be valued less. The solution for writers is to find more channels, and to write more content of a shorter length.
Will content writing always have value?
Also in my reading today I learned of the little camera on the front of Apple’s yet-to-be-released iPhone, the one stolen in a bar. The buzz is that this signals video phone calling. It certainly signals a lessening of SMS, and could possibly hurt Twitter in the long run. But I don’t yet see the end of written content. In fact, no way! The Internet didn’t kill books as predicted. Facebook didn’t kill email as predicted.
I believe content writing will have value as long as ideas matter, and that will always be the case.
