In 2001, I got an itch to write a book. Like many people, I naïvely thought, "I have a book or two in me," as if writing a book is as easy as putting pen to paper. It turns out to be very time consuming, and that's after you've spent countless hours learning and researching and organizing your topic of choice. But I marched on and wrote or co-wrote 10 books in a five-year period. I'm a glutton for punishment.
My day job during that time was programming. I've been programming for 16 years. My whole career I've focused on automating the un-automatable — essentially making computers do things people never thought they could do. By the time I started on my 10th book, I got another kind of itch — I wanted to automate my writing career. I was getting bored with the tedium of writing books, and the money wasn't that good.
But that's absurd, right? How can a computer possibly write something coherent and informative, much less entertaining? The "how can a computer possibly do X?" questions are the ones I've spent my career trying to answer. So, I set out on a quest to create software that could write. It took more effort than writing 10 books put together, but after building a team of 12 people, we were able to use our software to generate more than 100,000 sports-related stories in a nine-month period.
Before I get into specifics with what our software produces, I think it's worth highlighting some of the attributes that make software a great candidate to be a writer:
Software doesn't get writer's block, and it can work around the clock.
Software can't unionize or file class-action lawsuits because we don't pay enough (like many of the content farms have had to deal with).
Software doesn't get bored...