Completely meaningless. "Written by a computer" doesn't really mean anything. What's important it's the breadth and variety of the content an algorithm can generate, its ability to choose the most relevant among its input data, and the amount of meaningless content that has to be discarded by a human supervisor before publishing.
Take fragment 6:
“Tuesday was a great day for W. Roberts, as the junior pitcher threw a perfect game to carry Virginia to a 2-0 victory over George Washington at Davenport Field.”
Cool. And who told the computer it was a great day for him? Who told the computer he was playing? Who told it his game was "perfect"? This sentence can be written by a professional human journalist in about ten seconds, how long does it take to input in a computer the data that make up the story or to check among hundreds of possible variations for one that doesn't contain obvious mistakes?
Or:
“Kitty couldn’t fall asleep for a long time. Her nerves were strained as two tight strings, and even a glass of hot wine, that Vronsky made her drink, did not help her. Lying in bed she kept going over and over that monstrous scene at the meadow.”
Ok, it's a novel, written by a computer. Now, everybody can write a software that produces one single novel: just store it as a single string in the program and print it out. The magic happens when the computer can write something that goes way beyond the data that was stored in it exactly for that purpose. So how many different novels can this program write? Does the result exceed considerably the effort of the programmers put in the program itself? Most probably not, otherwise we'd be talking of a general AI.
and the amount of meaningless content that has to be discarded by a human supervisor before publishing.
If that actually happened the web would be a pretty barren place. Some of the most popular tech and science news websites publish short news articles that make you wonder about this sort of stuff.
I suppose an algorithm, whether machine or human, is only as good as the operator.
Yes, and interesting: the human hardware, despite being apparently self-aware and adaptable, is always limited by the software the operator loads in to it. The hardware has limitations too, of course, though it seems most of our limitations are self-imposed.
I wonder if self-awareness and self-conciousness can actually be decoupled? I think that's what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is on about when he talks of 'flow state' - where 'awareness' becomes decoupled from the 'self'.
Can we program a machine to be better at that than we are? Is that actually an ideal state to be in permanently?
Take fragment 6: “Tuesday was a great day for W. Roberts, as the junior pitcher threw a perfect game to carry Virginia to a 2-0 victory over George Washington at Davenport Field.”
Cool. And who told the computer it was a great day for him? Who told the computer he was playing? Who told it his game was "perfect"? This sentence can be written by a professional human journalist in about ten seconds, how long does it take to input in a computer the data that make up the story or to check among hundreds of possible variations for one that doesn't contain obvious mistakes?
Or: “Kitty couldn’t fall asleep for a long time. Her nerves were strained as two tight strings, and even a glass of hot wine, that Vronsky made her drink, did not help her. Lying in bed she kept going over and over that monstrous scene at the meadow.”
Ok, it's a novel, written by a computer. Now, everybody can write a software that produces one single novel: just store it as a single string in the program and print it out. The magic happens when the computer can write something that goes way beyond the data that was stored in it exactly for that purpose. So how many different novels can this program write? Does the result exceed considerably the effort of the programmers put in the program itself? Most probably not, otherwise we'd be talking of a general AI.