We have a 58 page document detailing AOL's master plan.

Ok this is really interesting and i want to go through it all, there is definitely something to learn about.

31,500 articles per month * average of $99 a piece = ~$3.12M/mth in content generation.

Now i understand why these companies focusing on automated content generation have a big future. I am sure they can cut the $99 by half with a decent result, if not better.

It’s big money: Demand Media went public recently, and AOL’s leading the charge with its low cost Seed.com service and, arguably, its $315 million buyout of the Huffington Post. Journalists roll their eyes at this stuff, but content farms — for better or worse — are hard to ignore right now, driving down prices and flooding the market with stories. But what if you took the content farm model even further — by crowdsourcing everything? That’s the objective of My Boss Is a Robot, an experimental exercise to see how automated the process of journalism can become. It’s being overseen by two San Francisco-based journalists, Jim Giles and MacGregor Campbell, who want to understand what automation and crowdsourcing mean for journalism in the long term.

This is, with no doubt, the future of content creation and a big headache for any search engine out there.

Narrative Science transforms data into high-quality editorial content. Our technology application generates news stories, industry reports, headlines and more — at scale and without human authoring or editing. Narratives can be created from almost any data set, be it numbers or text, structured or unstructured.

This is very interesting and a new headache in Google's fight to remove content farms i think.

The startup popped up on my radar because they got a round of $6M, lead by a VC who's, i guess, okay with flooding the web with non-human generated content... and add another level of challenges to the "battle to make a better internet" some of us are fighting for...

And some more about this service:

Narrative Science delivers: Long & short form articles, headlines, summaries & more Customized formats, voices & points-of-view All original & optimized content Scalable coverage for niche & local markets

I guess as long as there is money to be made, there will be a VC.

What's your take on this?

Vicarious Systems hasn’t launched yet, but the company said it will be “developing algorithms that mimic the function of the human brain,” and that its first product will be “a vision system that understands the contents of images and videos the way humans do.”