Sports writers are sharpening their pencils and maliciously eying their laptops as researchers in the Intelligent Informations Lab at Northwestern University announce that they’ve created a program that can write a convincing baseball news story without human help. Called Stats Monkey, the new computer software analyzes the box scores, and play by plays to automatically generate the news article. It highlights key players and clutch plays and will even write an appropriate headline and find a matching photo for a few player! Check out a sample story written by Stats Monkey after the break.

Not satisfied with worrying only baseball sports writers, developers say Stats Monkey could be adapted to any situation with a heavy helping of statistical data. Translation: it could work for every sport humans like to read about. Moreover, Stats Monkey could be adapted to write business stories, or conference updates, or other forms of professional journalism that rely heavily on numbers and analytics. Writing, it seems, is no longer immune from automation.

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