[onion2k]

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.

[flashman]

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.

[pjc50]

> 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.

[miki123211]

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.

[HappMacDonald]

Every time I hear "even then" about a large language model I swear I can hear a fidget spinner fossilizing in the distance