When will we regulate the bidding bots, the electronic microsecond trading that has turned our once human economy into a cyborg market? Robots take our jobs and now they are taking over our corporate structures. We are not in control anymore, and if something isn’t done soon, everything this nation has built will come crashing down.”
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B UGS IN AUTOMATED WRITING SYSTEMS FLOOD ONLINE NEWS
By Anna Zeabee, Wired
----
T hey have been heralded for years as the next wave in machine displacement of human workers. They are the programs that have been written to produce news articles, financial reports, sports summaries, even law briefs. Light years ahead of the clumsy text and speech generators of a generation ago, they are now increasingly used by all the major media outlets to fill the seemingly insatiable appetite for online content.
They are even the seeds of new businesses, as Image Council’s Jeff Philips has deluged the publishing industry with manuals and fact guides created only by computer algorithms that write books based on the contents of databases and fact lists.
But today a major bug has turned these time-saving tools into seemingly independent intelligences as thousands of unapproved and propagandistic news stories swamped online publishing sites, hijacking a significant fraction of the news reported.
While the chaos on Wall Street was the story of the day, for several hours the New York Times sported a headline criticizing income inequality in a thousand-word manifesto.
“It’s clear that we have some hackers playing with our system,” said Executive editor Jerry Wilbur. “The writing seems to be similar to taking a fourth grader’s dictionary and throwing it into a dishwasher. Nevertheless, it took some time to pull it.”
Despite the high profile nature of the breach, the Times was hardly alone. Most of the major news feeds and even news flagship websites were drowned in a cascade of articles focused on financial statistics and world economic problems. The automated systems adopted a Marxist bent that seemed funny to many except for the problems caused.
“Income inequality? Corporate welfare? Lobbying and money? All very interesting to some left-wingers and it was cute to see the Wall Street Journal ’s editorial page moaning about the evils of capitalism,” said a source at a competing publication. “But this shut down our news systems as well. This was a global problem that cost man-hours and will total in the millions to fix. We’re still flushing these bot-articles out. They haven’t stopped. Only when the companies running them shut things down will it end. Meanwhile, we’re unplugging from their services. Right now, they’re drowning us.”
18
Masked Executions
E vening had fallen on the crowds in Times Square, but the streets were bathed in electric hues from multiple monitors displaying ads and streaming video from numerous locations. Horns blared as cars piled along curbs waiting for an opportunity to turn into adjacent streets through the flood of pedestrians. Some walked in groups. Many seemed tuned out and into their digital devices. All were dressed in jackets to ward off the late October chill.
One by one, those walking the streets began to slow down, staring at their phones or tablets. Others began to crane their necks upward, interrupting their conversations, staring puzzled at the glowing behemoths of dancing images around them. Within a minute, nearly all the motion in the square had come to a halt, and the blaring of horns increased ten-fold as roadways were completely blocked.
Like dominoes, all the monitors in the square flipped jerkily to the same static image: a circle with a globe depicted in grid lines, leaves of a plant along the sides, the figure of a headless man in a black and white suit with a question mark over him.
Out of a window, a taxi driver stuck his head and gazed up at the bizarre tiling of images across the buildings around him. He tugged on
----
B UGS IN AUTOMATED WRITING SYSTEMS FLOOD ONLINE NEWS
By Anna Zeabee, Wired
----
T hey have been heralded for years as the next wave in machine displacement of human workers. They are the programs that have been written to produce news articles, financial reports, sports summaries, even law briefs. Light years ahead of the clumsy text and speech generators of a generation ago, they are now increasingly used by all the major media outlets to fill the seemingly insatiable appetite for online content.
They are even the seeds of new businesses, as Image Council’s Jeff Philips has deluged the publishing industry with manuals and fact guides created only by computer algorithms that write books based on the contents of databases and fact lists.
But today a major bug has turned these time-saving tools into seemingly independent intelligences as thousands of unapproved and propagandistic news stories swamped online publishing sites, hijacking a significant fraction of the news reported.
While the chaos on Wall Street was the story of the day, for several hours the New York Times sported a headline criticizing income inequality in a thousand-word manifesto.
“It’s clear that we have some hackers playing with our system,” said Executive editor Jerry Wilbur. “The writing seems to be similar to taking a fourth grader’s dictionary and throwing it into a dishwasher. Nevertheless, it took some time to pull it.”
Despite the high profile nature of the breach, the Times was hardly alone. Most of the major news feeds and even news flagship websites were drowned in a cascade of articles focused on financial statistics and world economic problems. The automated systems adopted a Marxist bent that seemed funny to many except for the problems caused.
“Income inequality? Corporate welfare? Lobbying and money? All very interesting to some left-wingers and it was cute to see the Wall Street Journal ’s editorial page moaning about the evils of capitalism,” said a source at a competing publication. “But this shut down our news systems as well. This was a global problem that cost man-hours and will total in the millions to fix. We’re still flushing these bot-articles out. They haven’t stopped. Only when the companies running them shut things down will it end. Meanwhile, we’re unplugging from their services. Right now, they’re drowning us.”
18
Masked Executions
E vening had fallen on the crowds in Times Square, but the streets were bathed in electric hues from multiple monitors displaying ads and streaming video from numerous locations. Horns blared as cars piled along curbs waiting for an opportunity to turn into adjacent streets through the flood of pedestrians. Some walked in groups. Many seemed tuned out and into their digital devices. All were dressed in jackets to ward off the late October chill.
One by one, those walking the streets began to slow down, staring at their phones or tablets. Others began to crane their necks upward, interrupting their conversations, staring puzzled at the glowing behemoths of dancing images around them. Within a minute, nearly all the motion in the square had come to a halt, and the blaring of horns increased ten-fold as roadways were completely blocked.
Like dominoes, all the monitors in the square flipped jerkily to the same static image: a circle with a globe depicted in grid lines, leaves of a plant along the sides, the figure of a headless man in a black and white suit with a question mark over him.
Out of a window, a taxi driver stuck his head and gazed up at the bizarre tiling of images across the buildings around him. He tugged on
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