Monday, July 16, 2012

Big Fail on the Turing Test

Proofreading is a low priority in the age of Twitter, but sometimes the English is so mistake-ridden or the style so tin-earish that it is reasonable to suppose that a computer must be the author, or perhaps the translator of a piece originally written in another language.

Below is an example of such writing, an article about Apple.

The headline with the phrase "...More Smaller and Cheaper iPad" makes a poor first impression, of course, but may not have been the fault of the writer. The lead sentence, however, made me wince:
Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) is working on smaller and cheaper iPad model in an effort to compete with the rival products in Tablet Market like Google’s Nexus 7 and Amazon’s Kindle Fire, according to a report.
Why are the articles a and the missing? Why is Tablet Market capitalized?

A quick scan of the piece reveals that every sentence has at least one grammatical or vocabulary error but strangely, there are no spelling mistakes.

Perhaps this is another sign that a computer wrote this. If so, it's not up to the standard of the better robot reporters.

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