The Speechwriting Machine

We know political speeches can be formulaic. But can they be written by artificial intelligence? Yes, says a University of Massachusetts researcher who created a speechwriting algorithm using a database of 4,000 speech segments from 53 Congressional floor debates to create plausible Democratic and Republican speeches.

“In particular,” says creator Valentin Kassarnig, “the grammatical correctness and the sentence transitions of most speeches were very good.”

“I was told there would be no math,” says speechwriter Eric Schnure, who contributed this item.