I remarked to a friend the a few weeks ago that I thought it would be interesting to write a program that reads a sports box score and compose a news story. It would be an interesting programming exercise – however it turns out that I am too late. Narrative Sciences has already been formed to auto generate news stories from data. I have noticed that many financial news releases appear to be purely data driven – i think more robotic stories are on the way. The quality of the current stories is pretty poor – but I would think in a few years it could probably rival traditional sports summary stories.
The net effect of these auto generated stories in the near term will likely just be to flood the search engines with more garbage content.