I have to say that I find the academically aspect of what he did very fascinating. Content creation based on simple facts and resulting in human readable (enjoyable?) sentences is a very difficult topic. Having worked in the artificial department at my University for some time, I'd be very interested in how exactly his logic based synthesizer works.
That being said, I think that the application of this technique he presents in this video is... disturbing.
Automatically creating statistical reports is one thing - I assume that nobody will ever want to read more than one of those in her life. This stuff is boring enough when just written by humans. Having it template-based done by algorithms denies the result everything but the bare facts: not a single bit of experience (which would be applied by the human author), no conclusions, and no unique distinction. The example, given in the
NYT article, proves the naivety of the approach: extrapolating data from a related study and filling in the template in question might be much faster for a computer. Though I have reason to believe that an adequate presentation compiled and written by a human experienced in this type of work might not take much more than one day work resulting with information in a more compact and thus consumable form.
Probably would have taken the human even less than thirty seconds to conclude that using antipsychotic drug statistics of the USA are in no way applicable to worldwide use (not even when reducing the area to industry nations only) and therefore that the whole task is moot.
But publishing language dictionaries, thesauri, and medical dictionaries which are (according on user comments) based on free accessible web information is more than a bit dubious (not to say ethically controversial). Sure it wouldn't sell as much if he just declares that he has a decent web crawler, data mining, and linguistic statistics engine and sold the result without the (questionable task of) sentence synthesis.
However creating language education programs or even game show scripts with this technique is just.... dumb. No wonder fewer and fewer people are able to talk in a competent and understandable way nowadays if their learning process is based on statistics where words are taught with no emotional infliction or any other contextual value (and I don't even want to think about the stupidity of teaching language in a shot-em-up game).
But my highlight where the words about his future work. Not that I'm much into romance novels, though I think that there is
more to it than "only so many body parts". And the (although ironically meant) comparison of possible advancements in poem creation to Shakespeare cannot be covered with hubris anymore.
In my point of view Mr. Parker lacks the understanding of the distinction between eloquent and good writing. He's seems more the quantity over quality kind of person.