Posted on 02/08/2019 10:20:47 PM PST by Windflier
As journalists face increased layoffs despite the growing appetite for up-to-the-minute, timely news, a new trend has quietly been disrupting the news industry.
Enter the automated reporter.
News organizations are increasingly turning toward artificial intelligence (AI) for production, using a variety of new automated systems to pump out content with minimal need for direct human input.
According to a report by The New York Times, Bloomberg News relies on a system called Cyborg to produce about a third of its articles.
Most of Cyborg’s output takes the form of company earnings reports that are rife with percentages, charts, and other financial data that can be crunched down into a news story quickly and accurately.
But Bloomberg isn’t alone. Increasingly, major news agency like Reuters and Associated Press, along with a number of newspapers such as Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, are using algorithms to crunch out news on everything from local minor league sports games to earthquakes.
Even Patch, which publishes local news nationwide, relies on AI to draft anywhere between 5 to ten percent of its stories for the 800 communities that it serves.
Last year, the Washington Post took first place in the category of “Excellence in Use of Bots” at the Global BIGGIES Awards for its use of Heliograf, a robot reporter that was used in the Post’s coverage of the 2016 Olympic Summer Games and that year’s election. The judges hailed Heliograf’s work for the Post, noting that its “set of examples and explanations are eloquently written and backed. The results also seem quite promising. Very impressive.”
Are they . . . Russian bots?
Well, maybe this is a partial explanation of the spreading bad grammar and strange language constructions seen in modern “journalism”.
I'll bet it's a big contributor, but the public schools are still the number one culprit.
Hence, the demand for Free Republic increases dramatically.
Keep it up guys and gals. What you do here is important to our republic.
Robots write, NPCs consume.
Breaking News on the Orange Man Bad Show!
Orange Man Bad.
Now back to everybody loves Hypnotoad!
no one is watching or reading, it doesn’t matter in the end
garbage in, garbage out
Omit key facts
Add unrelated oppinion
Sight imaginary sources
Blame Trump
Its so easy even a non-robot could do it!
Too bad it’s robots. Demand for a wall would shoot to 90+% if it was South Americans taking media jobs.
“Is it just journalists or could it also be Hollywood script writers too?”
Of course. And the same thing has already happened in the field of science and technical writing. In this case, though, the computer generated papers were replete with errors, like junk science supporting global warming.
https://www.nature.com/news/publishers-withdraw-more-than-120-gibberish-papers-1.14763
AI should have no problem learning to code.
Why bother teaching journalists how to do it?
most “news” articles are just the retyping of tweets. Some go as far as including the screen shot of the tweet and then just re-type the tweet. THAT’S NOT REPORTING!
I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords, and look forward to news that is free of grammatical errors.
Incompetent headline. It is AI, not robots, and they are writing 1/3 of the nyt articles. Not what the headline says.
Information that is presented in a consistent form, concerning a limited subset of one subject, lends itself to automation. No surprise there.
he's running low on Lone Star but I'll have him filled back up to the brim shortly--
Something is definitely wrong with so called reporters. They do not understand their subject matter.
Is the article about George Will?
Creepy.
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