In the LA Times earthquake news wrote a robot

Only three minutes after the California earthquake on March 17, the LA Times published a note on this subject. The message looks quite ordinary: the exact time, the strength of the earthquake and its radius are indicated. The only sign of something unusual is the postscript at the end: “The post was created by an algorithm written by the author.” In other words, the article was written by a robot.

The QuakeBot algorithm for processing information about earthquakes is far from the only program that generates news texts. In the LA Times, there is the LA Mapping project, where you can create a text report comparing different areas. The Homicide Report program automates the publication of criminal killings reports.

In some areas, journalistic robots have already reached perfection. For example, according to a study published in Journalism Practice a month ago, most readers are unable to reliably recognize a sports report written by a robot, writes New Scientist. Readers call such texts "trustworthy" and "informative," although "slightly boring."
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Robots do an excellent job with short materials on specialized topics, when the sources of information in the specified format are known in advance. In the fast processing of large amounts of information, they have a clear advantage over man. In the case of QuakeBot, the process of generating text was reduced to simply extracting numbers from the US Geological Survey mailing list and filling in a previously prepared text template with the subsequent automatic download of the article to the newspaper’s website. The robot sent letters to the editors about the publication of the note so that they could check the text.

Programs have one more advantage: they can generate millions of news notes, attracting search traffic. For example, the algorithms of the company Automated Insights for the past year gave a lot of 300 million articles. A regular journalist seeks to write one article that will be read by as many people as possible. Robots have a completely opposite task. For example, it can be text reports about games of a fantasy sports simulator - reports that are interesting only for two owners of virtual teams. Two readers are already excellent.

According to experts, in the future, journalist robots can find application in new niche areas, such as lifelogging and report generation from physical activity sensors, which are now very popular in the West as part of the universal quantification hobby ( collecting detailed statistics about their lives in a passive mode) .