I am by no means a talented programmer. I'm more of a talented cut and paster. However, with very basic tools that anyone can use, I attempted to see if I could automate writing news articles. This is the result.

https://pic8.co/sh/Kr79km.png

Obviously, a determined company can improve on automated journalism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_journalism

Typically, the process involves an algorithm that scans large amounts of provided data, selects from an assortment of pre-programmed article structures, orders key points, and inserts details such as names, places, amounts, rankings, statistics, and other figures.[4] The output can also be customized to fit a certain voice, tone, or style.

https://digiday.com/media/washington-posts-robot-reporter-published-500-articles-last-year/

It’s been a year since The Washington Post started using its homegrown artificial intelligence technology, Heliograf, to spit out around 300 short reports and alerts on the Rio Olympics. Since then, it’s used Heliograf to cover congressional and gubernatorial races on Election Day and D.C.-area high school football games, producing stories like this one and tweets like this:

Here is what the WaPo's bot is doing:

The Landon Bears shut out the visiting Whitman Vikings, 34-0, on Friday.

Landon opened the game with a 90-yard kickoff return for a score by Jelani Machen. Landon added to their lead on John Geppert's five-yard touchdown run. The first quarter came to a close with Landon leading, 14-0.

In the second quarter, the Bears went even further ahead following Joey Epstein's four-yard touchdown run. The Bears scored again on Geppert's one-yard touchdown run.

Landon had the lead going into the second half, 27-0. The Bears extended their lead on Tommy Baldwin's nine-yard touchdown reception.

Neither team scored in the fourth quarter.

Landon's top rusher was Geppert, who had nine carries for 59 yards and two touchdowns. Chazz Harley led Landon with 16 receiving yards on two catches.

Whitman's top passer was Landon Hawkins, who completed 4 of 11 passes for 22 yards and one interception. The Vikings' top rusher was Devin Carone, who had 19 carries for 111 yards. The Vikings' top receiver was Jonah Bird, who had one catch for 24 yards.

Landon will play St. Mary's-Annapolis High School (1-0, 0-0) on Sept. 8. Whitman will play Einstein High School (1-0, 0-0) on Sept. 8.

The truth is, even when the bot doesn't sound quite right, a human editor can produce a great quantity of original content.

With this method, since I collect text from all relevant articles to my interests, I can generate very cohesive rough drafts that I produce in very little time; merely fixing wording and adding pictures. If I put a bunch of Leftist garbage in the dataset, or a bunch of White Supremacy material from 8chan, I can sound like a random idiot on the Internet just using Markovian chains and not even real AI.

People are walking around with datasets in their heads and they output accordingly; just like an AI. I wonder if this manifesto might have been the product of such a process.