By Allan Wall
01/30/2016
Even the employment of political speechwriters may now be in danger. A University of Massachusetts researcher has invented a machine that can write political speeches.
Soon, the speeches that we hear from political figures may be the product of an AI machine that has been specifically designed to write political discourses. There seems to be a formula to writing speeches. For instance, political speeches sound similar and tend to have a standard format. Arguments in these political discourses seem to be repeated as well. Speeches also seem to use familiar phrases that show the speaker’s certain political affiliation or ideology. AI Politics: How An Artificial Intelligence Algorithm Can Write Political Speeches Menchie Mendoza, Tech Times, January 26, 2016
Yes, that’s absolutely correct. So in a way, we're already doing the same thing already, just not with an AI machine.
Look at speeches about immigration and the National Question. Just insert "nation of immigrants", "the American dream", "not who we are", "broken immigration system", "secure the border", etc. These speeches just write themselves already.
Valentin Kassarnig of the University of Massachusetts Amherst took all of these into consideration and made an AI machine to rival human speech writers. "In this report we present a system that can generate political speeches for a desired political party," wrote Kassarnig. "Furthermore, the system allows to specify whether a speech should hold a supportive or opposing opinion." Kassarnig said that in order to start training a machine-learning algorithm, he first built a database of around 4,000 political speech nuggets that he got from 53 Congressional floor debates in the United States. He gathered more than 50,000 sentences out of the speeches, with each sentence having 23 words on average. He also divided the speeches into categories depending on the political party (Democrat or Republican) and whether the speech is for or against a certain topic.
The article has more detail and includes an example. And check out the last paragraph:
While the AI algorithm shows huge potential in generating decent political speeches, Kassarnig is not limiting the potential of the algorithm to just politics. Instead, he suggests that the algorithm can also produce other types of texts, including news articles and blog posts.
Well, of course, the same principles would apply. Mainstream media articles about immigration are nearly always written with the same basic formulas and just write themselves already. Now, with AI news agencies can just lay off the reporters and have computers write the articles.
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