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Pardon my paranoia. But someone out there is trying to steal my job.
Lots of somebodies, actually. And they can't be bargained with. They can't be reasoned with. They don't feel pity, or remorse or fear. And they absolutely will not stop -- ever! -- until I quit swiping quotes wholesale out of old Terminator movies.
Just when I thought more journalism jobs couldn't be downsized, outsourced or rendered as obsolete as an NHL beat writer in the Sun Belt, here comes news of this.
Undergraduate computer science students are teaming with graduate journalism students at Northwestern University to innovate ways technology can save the media when it comes to gathering news. OK, I appreciate someone trying to help my industry out of its death spiral.
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But one group wants to figure out how to turn baseball box scores into prose.
Uh ... right.
Here is the project in the Wildcats' own words:
MACHINE GENERATED SPORTS STORY: This system takes readily available information about sports games -- box scores, play-by-plays -- and automatically generates a news story that captures the overall highlights and dynamics of the game, including an appropriate headline and a photo of the most important player. The system uses baseball statistical models to figure out what the news is and uses a library of narrative arcs to describe the main dynamics. This system is ideal for Little League, high school, or college sports games that newspapers wouldn't normally cover. It could also be used by sports teams who want to publish their own information on the game.
So maybe my Terminator reference is appropriate. This damn thing could turn into the Skynet of my profession.
Are you news consumer OK with this? Do you care if the mechanical cast of I, Robot starts applying for press passes?
We sportswriters are skeptical to say the least. As one of my buddies pointedly shot back in our e-mail conversation about this:
"I'd like to see this [freakin'] machine figure out what the lead and headline would be from a box score of a game where the winning run scored after a guy on first advanced on a passed ball, stole third and then scored on a squeeze bunt."
True dat. Especially if that player is L.A.'s Manny Ramirez in interleague play at Fenway Park in his first game back from his next drug suspension.
If robot sportswriters take over, good luck maintaining credibility after a mistake -- if the machine gets one algorithm wrong, who knows what it's liable to spit out.
Are you going to believe some stupid computer that tells you a famous college basketball coach in his 50s has unprotected sex with a stranger in a restaurant, she gets pregnant, he pays $3,000 straight cash money for "insurance" to get an abortion, then she tries to extort him about it? Oh, and that this skank also married said coach's strength trainer assistant along the way?
I might believe some of those rumors from a Mac. But definitely not a PC.
But it's no use complaining. My downfall is inevitable.
Everybody on the tech side of the communication game is building a better mousetrap. I'm sure someone's already written an iPhone ap called "Make a journalist starve today."
It doesn't matter that computers will generate stories that have all the life, urgency and relevance of a pile of TPS reports from 1999. It will be cheaper in the long run than hiring and training sportswriters, and probably save thousands of dollars on press box buffet reimbursements too.
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Anyway, I guess it would be sour grapes at this point to mention some fatal flaws in the brainiacs' plans:
If all the software works ... if all the calculations and theorems check out ... if miracle of miracles occurs and these machines can truly write an accurate game story based on a box score ... guess what?
You'll have wasted your time crafting a game story no one wanted to read in the first place.
Journalism doesn't do a lot of supply-and-demand things well these days. But by and large, this rule holds true: You can't waste resources writing about things that aren't of interest to a mass audience.
Oh sure, you would love to read a write-up of your Little Johnny's Little League game from Tuesday night. But no one else does. If you want to know, go ask him.
Information-wise, society has become the opposite of Fahrenheit 451. Instead of burning books to erase all knowledge, we have so much information that we can't sort out the relevant from the useless.
Why would anyone think it's a good thing to devote MORE attention from our daily lives into how exactly Lenoir-Rhyne College beat Wingate 6-2 in a random regular-season game?
The other fatal flaw: Box scores still have to be tabulated by a human. And if it something amazing happened in this high school baseball game -- like an unassisted triple play or a naked Arnold Schwarzenegger caught the final out when he materialized out of nowhere amid of flash of blue lightning -- then the scorekeeper or other eyewitness can surely jot down a sentence or two and pass it along.
So I guess what I'm saying is: Machines that can write instant gamers out of box scores won't impress me as practical until we have machines that can automatically compile the box score of a game that happened right in front of them, too.
Which brings us to our next journalistic ethical dilemmas.
Should we build robot baseball journalists to look like Terminators ... or the Fembots from the Austin Powers movies?
And if a story by a Fembot journalist won a Pulitzer prize, who would get credit? The programmer or the person who typed in the agate the Fembot cribbed off of?
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And if the Fembot journalists start rolling off the assembly line, would society get in an uproar if anyone filmed them naked through a peephole in their recharging room wall?
OK, enough of this useless talk about how technology can create artificial writing. Please know I am NOT a believer in it.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to return to my basement, where I've got a hundred monkeys and typewriters in cages. I'm trying to train them to type the complete works of William Shakespeare. If my calculations are correct, one of them should be able to pull it off within the next hundred years, even if it's from the group I'm allowing to hit the keys randomly.
My money's on the one I call "Blinky."
Gregory Hardy writes the Sports Guesspert column for the Columbia (S.C.) State. He's bound to type something stupid at twitter.com/hardyvision.
