He’s or her job is specifically to look at this content that’s being generated by the AI, and making sure that it passes muster. They do have a human in the loop, but what’s really fascinating I think is this use of technology to create the human interface which is the text, is created by the AI. I kind of feel like, when you think about baseball in the long history of the game. You think about this all the human achievements that go along with it, and it’s also of course very important as part of our national culture.

To see this take place, which is essentially the AP does not have enough reporters to cover Minor League baseball games. Now it has this AI reporter, and if you don’t mind I’m going to read a sentence or two from a game that was written by an AI. Here it is.

No human actually has to do what I did, and read that copy because it’s extremely dull. Now automated insights actually provides this service to other companies besides MLB including companies reporting earnings or if you have like edmunds.com I think uses them to describe their cars. They certainly got thousands and thousands of cars on their websites. They need some kind of narrative for each one of those. That’s generated by AI. One of the things that I enjoy about baseball is the narrative, the flavor of that, the tension, the writing frankly. For me, this is not compelling writing. Dirk what’s your take on this first 4A of transferring pure data into narrative?

Sort of here are the facts run down of it. Humans have done that crap for a long time, right? I don’t think it’s particularly remarkable or unremarkable, that what the AI is producing in this case is sterile. Because what the humans produced in this case is also sterile. My question is more, would the AI be capable of more. It’s very safe to have AI do the sterile thing. As you pointed out the article mentions that, and to me. This was the more interesting part of it, the article mention this has already being done for earnings report, and cars and other stuff.

None of that is getting big write ups, right? What is the sort of romantic about baseball and sports and our relationship with it. That now just becomes a story even though what’s being done here in the baseball context is just a per forma and blend and sort of lack of imagination and representation of just sort of human scale of cranking it on its scale. Yet now that it’s a baseball story, it’s a headline. it’s something that we’re able to be exposed to through the wonderful world of liking and re-tweeting.

To me that’s fascinating and particularly because you talked about the romance of the narrative and why that makes it important. What’s happening here has nothing absolutely nothing to do with that. Yet just the context of baseball and the tradition of romance and narrative, elevate this in a way that from a technological perspective from a theoretical job taking perspective the story was even more important at the earlier point when they started to do this for corporate earnings, instead of Minor League Baseball stuff.

It’s just kind of a lot of interesting things later in here to look at and talk about.

We have the scripted drama which we love in television and the movies. What’s so attractive about sports event is that you don’t know how it’s going to turn out and nobody else does either. There’s this immediacy, this of human effort that makes us love sports.

Now not all of baseball management thinks that way, there are few teams or there are probably very many teams at this point who are leveraging that technology. There’s always been this tension, where it’s kind of this unholy marriage, right? The statistics are not a replacement for the human eyeball so called. Baseball I think just because of its longevity, and because of its priority as the national past time so called, but now of course we all know that’s mostly football. Baseball sort of high positioned in our society, and has all contributed to that tension with technology.

I think for myself when I think of the reporter at the baseball game. I kind of harking back to like the 1950s, the guy in the fedora hat with the reporter’s notebook we all know that’s not happening anymore. Sort of in our minds I see him replaced with this little computer, or an iPhone but wearing the same damn hat. I don’t think so either. To follow on what you were talking about Dirk there’s this idea that computers take jobs, or that software eliminates job. There are little incursions, right into areas that can be highly creative like not this particular baseball story.

Baseball writing can be very creative, and we talked a few episodes back about AI going to art school and generating this full Rembrandt based on the masters, back catalog of lovely paintings and this AI was going to create this new painting. The computer, the software as creative force or as nominal creative this rising creative element in our society, as a creative person I have, I always find that a little dodgy. I know you may not have the same problems with it that I do, but I feel like this baseball story falls into that same area.

None of that to me is special or unique and it’s just a matter of time before the most creative pursuits that humans are able to express will be match and exceeded by machines. There’s a lot I don’t know on the engineering side, so I hesitate to put specific dates on it. I know for a fact, like there are somethings creatively, I’m really good at. I know exactly how I could communicate to an engineer, what the process is, what’s going on that gets me from zero to really cool funky, unexpected solution.

If I can do that, other people can do that. Once we’re able to translate that into commands for the machine. It’s game sudden match, and I don’t mean that from like a scary, “Oh my god are irrelevant perspective. Even though that’s one possible long term outcome.” Just from the perspective that this creativity isn’t special, it’s not protected, it’s not safe. It might be further out before the machines are able to get there, compared to the very sterile little minor league baseball game that you just related. It is going to inevitably come and so rather than feared out or chase against it we just have to think about what’s next for us.

I even suspect that they might be able to do that now. If not now, probably not now, very soon I think that’s possible. What I suspect will take longer, will be for that story to reach the level of the very best human sports writers. I don’t know who those people would be now. If you look, if you’re talking about like going back to the fedora hat days, somebody like Grantland Rice. I think if Grantland Rice was taking on that, and the supercomputer was taking on that.

I think Grantland Rice would have the better story. He’d have the one that was just, it was a little richer, it was a little more bring a little bit more to the table, little more humanity, whatever you want to have. I think from the standpoint of the mass market, of just getting a story that’s in a really nice narrative, emotional even job. I think machines are going to get there pretty fast. At the peak of human performance, it’s just going to take a longer time probably similar to the progress of games like chess, and go frankly.