Comment by onion2k
11 hours ago
You don't remember the discussion around Narrative Science (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrative_Science) then. They were a university spin-out that could write plausible-sounding baseball news articles (and later finance) from the stats. Their software enabled local news websites to publish articles about every game, which was seen as a boon to sports fans and a key driver for web traffic. There was a lot of criticism about how it wasn't 'real' though.
Slate published this about it in 2012: https://slate.com/technology/2012/03/narrative-science-robot...
For as long as we've had computers people have tried to make them sound human. It's not a new thing that people are concerned about knowing if they're talking to (or reading) a robot imitating a person.
> could write plausible-sounding baseball news articles (and later finance) from the stats
Back in the day, baseball commentators sometimes did this for live games they couldn't see based on very limited information they were being passed. One such commentator was .. Ronald Reagan.
Literally the first thing I wrote after OpenAI's chat completions API came out was a Python script that took in a JSON description of a football (soccer) game from an API and used gpt-3.5-turbo to generate an article about it.
I was surprised how well it worked, even then.
I didn't say there wasn't bot-generated content in the past. I said we weren't excited about a future where it was de rigeur.