Robot Sportswriters are the New Hoverboard

Before I contaminate your opinion, I’ll allow you to read the source for yourself:

As anybody on a sports beat can tell you, making game stories interesting day in and day out can be a brutal challenge, but for those with lesser ambitions, it can be something that you do in your sleep. Now some kids at the Intelligent Information Laboratory at Northwestern University are suggesting that an average game day story can be bolted together without human intervention.

Crawlers, using tried and true language, bolt in language and quotes automatically and before you know it, a story is, um, written. The project, called Stats Monkey, might have some sportswriters reaching for the bottle of Tums at a time when newspapers are reluctant to send reporters on the road to cover a team.

via The Robots Are Coming! Oh, They’re Here. – Media Decoder Blog – NYTimes.com.

This column is destined to be filed alongside ones from the past discussing moon colonies, flying cars, and laser guns. The idea of a robot writing sports columns in lieu of a human is the single most preposterous idea I’ve heard since Y2K. First of all, the media doesn’t even recognize bloggers as legitimate writers and while living in their parents’ basements, still share the same DNA. Can you imagine the uproar amongst cranky sportswriters if anyone even mentioned the idea of a robot doing game recaps? Mike Lupica would have a heart attack on the spot. Bob Ryan’s head would explode. Peter King would probably still name-drop the robot in a column.

If this robot (who I imagine as a grown up Vicki from Small Wonder) ever gained acceptance among its media peers, it simply couldn’t capture the human element of sports which we all love so dearly. For example, the robot mentioned in the article missed the point that the victory meant a playoff series sweep for the Angels. Kind of a small detail. With this thought, I also imagine the robo-writer would also miss some of the subjective points that sports fans live to argue over. Was that 4th INT the QB’s fault? How was the clock management? What was the crowd like? A moral victory? A choke job?

As someone who liveblogs NFL games and occasionally wishes a robot would do my job, I know how absurd this idea is. Sports is a slightly less inflammatory conversation piece than politics, and people adore the joy and pain it brings them every week. While a robot could reproduce a statistics-based narrative, perfection would be it’s undoing in the beautifully flawed world of athletics.