I saw that done back in 1999 with animated avatars, text-to-speech, market news, stock updates, etc. I can't find the details offhand but I believe it was a Bloomberg thing.

Might not be what you were thinking but Ananova was doing stuff like that back then: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ananova

Ah, I think that was it. They were vague about how the copy was produced, so it might have been a bunch of interns.

Seriously, most finance "articles" already look like they were written by bots. I have no idea who reads garbage like this:

http://www.tradershuddle.com/20101117119131/Stocks/pre-marke...

http://collegestock.com/blog/885-metal-stocks-slumped-alcoa-...

There's literally no useful info, just data written as words.

That gets parsed back into data again by HFT bots probably. It's a mad world.

I ran across this one on the Motley Fool and discovered that they're doing this already.

http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2010/11/02/is-activisi...

The first 12 paragraphs and the last paragraph are completely boilerplate. There are two paragraphs in the middle that were probably human-written. What I don't know is whether this is just a prosthetic "code-generation" tool for their writers, or whether it's just this one writer.

This Google search shows that it is definitely boilerplate, and that some articles appear to be 100% generated:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&biw=1438&bih=697&...

Definitely a bot to "fool" the financial news aggregators.

HFT = High Frequency Trading ?

Yep. They do natural language parsing of wire news stories to try and synthesize market intelligence. Which is one day going to lead to a civilization-ending feedback loop due to the sort of thing we're discussing here (in my paranoid hyperbolic opinion :)