I used to work as a web editor at a daily newspaper. One of my daily responsibilities was to write and post short blurbs about lottery results and beach surf conditions. They both were extremely formulaic, so I wrote push-button scripts that would fetch the data, parse it, and generate stories. Saved me time, which I used to do other, more important things.

Some people have said, "Why not just display the raw data?"

Well, to save you the trouble of having to analyze the data.

For instance, suppose I've written a Powerball results script that lists the winning numbers, along with which states had winners.

If I'm just spitting out the raw data, then people might miss the fact that one of the winners was from our state -- whereas if I'm generating a story, I'm going to make that the lede.

Similarly, the magic of a company like Narrative Science and its Quill service is not in taking a ton of data and filling in a bunch of blanks with the values, Mad Libs style. It's in analyzing the data and figuring out what the most important parts are, and constructing a story around those findings.

In other words, it's not hard for a bot to write, "The Tigers played the Wolves yesterday. The Tigers won 1-0. The Tigers' John Johnson scored a home run."

It's more difficult to write, "The Tigers' Tom Thompson pitched the first no-hitter of his career yesterday in a 1-0 game against the Wolves. Remarkably, the Wolves' pitcher, Dobbie Dobson, was moments away from forcing the game into extra innings with his own no-hitter, when, in the ninth inning with two outs and two strikes on the board, the Tigers' John Johnson hit a home run."

(I'm not a baseball writer, so I'm probably bungling it, but you get the point.)