Jon: Welcome to episode 163 of The Digital Life. A show about our insights on the future of design and technology. I'm your Jon Follett. With me is founder and co-host Dirk Nemeyer.

Dirk: Hey Jon.

Jon: Hey Dirk. For our podcast this week, we're going to talk a little bit about that great American past time, which is baseball. Dirk are you a baseball fan, or do you just watch the game on occasion?

Dirk: When I was younger as a child, teenager, maybe young adult I was interested in baseball. It's been a really long time now and I watch the game on no occasion.

Jon: The reason that we're talking about baseball on a future technology show is that the Associated Press recently announced that it's covering Minor League Baseball game, on a national basis, using artificial intelligence and software from a company called Automated Insights. This the software company takes the MLB data and the stats from Minor League Baseball and it basically generates a narrative that then goes over the AP Wire, and the AP even has an editor who's specifically ...

He's or her job is specifically to look at this content that's being generated by the AI, and making sure that it passes muster. They do have a human in the loop, but what's really fascinating I think is this use of technology to create the human interface which is the text, is created by the AI. I kind of feel like, when you think about baseball in the long history of the game. You think about this all the human achievements that go along with it, and it's also of course very important as part of our national culture.

To see this take place, which is essentially the AP does not have enough reporters to cover Minor League baseball games. Now it has this AI reporter, and if you don't mind I'm going to read a sentence or two from a game that was written by an AI. Here it is.

Dirk: Jon, do so in your best artificial intelligence voice.

Jon: Okay. I'll try. God this is going to be bad. "State college PA, Dylan Tice was hit by a pitch with base is loaded with one out in the 11th inning giving the State College Spikes a 9 to 8 victory over the Brooklyn's Cyclones on Wednesday." What do you think?

Dirk: I thought you sounded great, actually. Well done, well done.

Jon: You can see how the ... It's a very utilitarian first line there. It goes on to talk about the game winning run, and the double play that preceded it, etc and the score throughout the game. It's very much a, it doesn't even rise to a level of a junior reporter recording this because there is no flavor per se. At least there is no flavor injected yet into this reporting it's pure data transferred to narrative. At some point in the future, I would hope that automated insights working conjunction with MLB will come up with some game flavor.

No human actually has to do what I did, and read that copy because it's extremely dull. Now automated insights actually provides this service to other companies besides MLB including companies reporting earnings or if you have like edmunds.com I think uses them to describe their cars. They certainly got thousands and thousands of cars on their websites. They need some kind of narrative for each one of those. That's generated by AI. One of the things that I enjoy about baseball is the narrative, the flavor of that, the tension, the writing frankly. For me, this is not compelling writing. Dirk what's your take on this first 4A of transferring pure data into narrative?

Dirk: I don't have the right language from the standpoint of journalism and publishing. I'm going to ... The way I'm going to communicate this, is going to be clumsy. There's somebody who immediately is going to be other saying, "The right word for this is this." The sort of short run down game summary structure. Even when it was written by humans have that similar sterile feel to it. Like there is in the context of sports reporting a genre is the wrong word. There are this is just a basic boring game.