*"The system knows that women generally favor stories
about Brad Pitt, but after some real-time analysis, it
can quickly realize that men are far more like to click
on a Brad Pitt story that involves a sports movie."*
This is like Michael Frayn's first comic novel "The Tin Men" (1965), about programming a computer to produce an "automated newspaper".
"But people really preferred an air crash. ... What
people enjoyed most was about 70 dead, with some 20
survivors including children rescued after at least
one night in open boats. They liked it to be backed
up with a story about a middle-aged housewife who had
been booked to fly aboard the plane but who had
changed her mind at the last moment."
Yury Lifshits (then a research scientist at Yahoo! Research) did a talk at Estonian Summer School on Computer Science called "Intro to Content Optimization" [1], where he explained one of the approaches. It makes an interesting read.
very interesting to see how steadily machine learning algorithms creep into our news feeds (eg. facebook) and deliver us with the the links we're most likely to click. but i fear that this will lead to a serious decline in editorial quality, leaving an endless stream of cute kittens and hair styling tips. who will tell us what's really going on if some algorithm decides what's newsworthy and what's not?
That will happen if the role of editor is replaced rather than (as Yahoo is doing) augmented.
I don't think you should fear a decline in editorial quality as much as you should fear the devaluation of news. If people want quality they must be willing to pay for it. If they don't want to, whose fault is that?
