The robot hasn’t replaced me, it won’t work on its own.

Editor’s note: This article is from the WeChat official account “Zoom Light” (ID: guokr233) , author: James Yang Yi, editor: Sun Ruliang, planning: light amplification team.

“The automated news writing robot automatically generates manuscripts in the first time according to the algorithm, outputs analysis and judgment in an instant, and delivers important information and interpretation to users within one minute.”

In 2015, Alpha Dog has not yet swept the chess world, and people have not yet been worried about their limited intelligence. However, in September of this year, Tencent Finance released an article entitled “CPI rose 2.0% year-on-year in August, creating 12 The article [1] of “Yue Xin Gao” flapped the wings of artificial intelligence-the author of this article is not a human, but an AI writing robot.

Since then, artificial intelligence has taken the second, third and more steps to the kingdom of human intelligence and inspiration.

The Rio Olympic Games in August 2016 became a show ground for AI writing robots of Internet companies such as Tencent and ByteDance. Its “second-level” drafting efficiency made a group of carbon-based lives beyond the reach of the dust, and even worsened the media. Ashamed. What people worry about is that it may not take long before text creators will be replaced by AI and become the labor force eliminated by technology.

However, four years later, these people still ought to eat, drink, and there is no sign of career end. Where are those AI writing robots that once threatened the careers of text creators?

A job grabbing robot

Things have to go back to 2015-Tencent’s Dreamwriter once triggered the Internet’s imagination of AI writing robots. [2] “Dreamwriter only takes 0.46 seconds to produce a manuscript on average.” Liu Kang, director of Tencent’s artificial intelligence project and head of Dreamwriter, introduced [3], Dreamwriter can produce more than 2500 articles per day. [4]

The writing robot xiaomingbot, born one year late, was jointly developed by ByteDance and the Computer Institute of Peking University. During the Rio Olympics in 2016, xiaomingbot created 457 event reports in 13 days and wrote 30 reports per day. Once became a hot topic in major technology media. [5]

After the Olympics, Xiaomingbot entered more than a dozen fields such as sports, technology, finance, and real estate, and its productivity increased exponentially. As of 2017, its manuscripts have reached more than 20,000. At the end of that year, xiaomingbot won the “Wu Wenjun Award”,Gradually shrinking, the creative content is only the football game until it stops. A recent article on the Toutiao App, stayed on August 29, 2019, and there has been no news since then.

Dreamwriter is still active today, and probably the only active writing robot-if you are careful enough, you can find its traces in some event reports, financial news and local weather forecasts.

However, today’s Dreamwriter is quite embarrassing within Tencent: “Some of the manuscripts written by robots will still enter the content pool, but due to quality issues, it is difficult to recommend them.” A former employee of Tencent Sports The editor told the zoom lamp team (ID: guokr233) that he was told during the induction training that if he saw the robot manuscript in the background, he could ignore it and not post it.

An interesting paradox is: the success of AI writing robots in attracting public attention also requires humans to write articles to introduce them to popularization-how do we believe that such high technology can produce good content?

Can the robot matter be called manuscript washing?

The “non-standard product” of the article is a typical product of human wisdom. It requires logic, language sense, aesthetics and values. If you want to write clearly and understandably, you probably need some talent. In contrast, no one can match the speed of AI writing robots, and the quality of manuscripts is really inadequate.

Take Dreamwriter as an example. There are big problems in language expression alone. Tencent insiders told the Zoom Light team that the manuscripts created by Dreamwriter had a lot of presentation flaws and required the editor to manually adjust a lot of details to meet the publishing standards. Sometimes the same person’s name is inconsistent in the same article, and the editor has to carefully proofread these common sense errors.

Not only that, but AI writing robots have no professional ethics at all. Basketball News reader Yu He discovered that Dreamwriter has learned to “slacken”.

Yu He told the magnifying lamp team that an article by Dreamwriter on Tencent News was titled “Booker 27 PointsAton 24+12 the sun overtakes the Wizards’ eight village base with 21 points”[10]href=”https://36kr.com/projectDetails/427808″ target=”_blank”>I am here to convince everyone not to worry about this. Artificial intelligence will not destroy mankind. Please trust me! ”[17]

But the next day, GPT-3 was criticized by the Russian TV station, claiming that the Guardian was sensational: the manuscript generated by GPT-3 was almost unreadable, and the eye-catching version was actually polished and polished by the staff. Integration. [18]

Even the GPT-3, which was touted to the sky, was defeated in front of writing. What is the problem with artificial intelligence writing?

Zhou Xin, former director of the Beijing branch of CBN and editor-in-chief of Yicai Global, stated in his personal blog in June 2019 that he noticed a problem when he participated in the development of AI writing robots around 2016: artificial intelligence writing calculations It is not a real creation, but a data replacement work based on specific scenarios.

He criticized the work of AI writing robots for “filling in the blanks”, saying that this was the result of developers “lazy”.

For example, if you want to write about the stock market, you must first enter all the stock information in the stock market, as well as the scenes and situations that can be changed, into this system, and then format them into a piece of paper Manuscripts like fill-in-the-blank questions, and when new information comes in, fill in these new numbers in the empty spaces. [19]

Does not solve the problem of AI “fill-in-the-blank writing”, AI’s independent creation of high-quality content is a false proposition.

According to Zhou Xin, not only domestic AI writing is the case, but also the AI ​​writing robots provided by several US artificial intelligence development companies for Reuters and The Associated Press have encountered the same problem. “Their path seems to be stuck. There.”[19]

Because of this, most of the content produced by AI writing robots is concentrated in the two fields of finance and sports. The writing of the news in these two industries is highly stylized, and only a certain arrangement and combination of information points are required. Add polish and it can become a piece of news.

Writing robots retreat behind the scenes

After realizing the problem of fill-in-the-blank AI, more and more companies have taken writing robots from the front and behind the scenes. In a concealed way, let the immature writing machines continue to shine.

“The weakening of the external presence of Internet company writing robots indicates that such products have been used internally.” In response, the marketing director of an AI writing company explained to the magnifying lamp team (ID: guokr233).

Dreamwriter wears a small penguin vest called “Weather Dynamics” and has so far quietly released 156,000 weather forecasts down to the district and county levels. The forecast content is not