Journalist Robots: Welcome to the Future

Perhaps some sports or business articles may seem a bit unusual. This is probably due to the fact that their author is a robot. It should be noted that the robots in this case do very well.



It is sometimes very boring for business journalists to write articles about the amounts earned by the company for the next quarter, about the demand for its products. However, such articles are necessary.



Therefore, the US news agency - The Associated Press - together with Automated Insights (AI) found a solution to this problem. Using the AI-developed Wordsmith platform, you can create up to 2,000 notes per second.

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Welcome to the future

Wordsmith generates millions of articles every week. A number of other companies are working with AI, including Allstate, Comcast, Yahoo and Yandex, which use this platform , in particular, to compile fantasy sports reports, says James Kotecki, public relations manager at Automated Insights.



Companies such as Narrative Sciencé and Yseór also offer robotic platform services, Nicholas Diakopolous writes.

How does a robot journalist work?

Early in the morning, the first task for robots in Narrative Science is to absorb tons of information. After all, it is - the necessary fuel for writing articles. After reading the data, the next step is to analyze them for new and interesting moments. Then the algorithm searches for statistical deviations from the already existing data — changing the parameters to a greater or lesser degree, something that stands out from the general series.







Following the definition of these "special" moments, it's time to look at other aspects of this event that are stored in the library. Thus, the news gets connectedness, consistency and detail. Such aspects are events, circumstances, actors, etc. All of them are evaluated by degree of importance from 1 to 10, so that the most significant are selected.



After forming and ordering all the related data, links are created between them, sorting by names, digital data. Now you can select the information you are interested in and add to it the accompanying data, photos or quotes of this or that person.



After that, the verbal shell of the news is generated, the correspondence of style and information is checked, and verbal turns are created.



This is how the story generated by the robot is born.

Will journalism disappear?

When introducing such systems, many journalists expressed great skepticism, says Philana Patterson, editor of the AP. After the launch of the program in July last year, all automated stories were checked by people. Errors were detected and sent to AI for correction and refinement. By October, the program was fully automated and worked without human intervention, and no employee was dismissed. In addition, the system makes the minimum number of errors compared to how many of them were made by people over the past years.



Journalist and social activist Barbara Ehrenreich (Barbara Ehrenreich) is very negative about the new technology. He writes that more and more tasks that previously required human participation are reduced to algorithms. She is concerned that, according to some experts, in 10 years, 90% of all news articles will be generated by computers.

Journalists are safe. For now

Martin Ford (Martin Ford), author of Robot Uprising, considers it unlikely that most journalistic functions will be performed by robots. However, he considers it more expected that some journalists will still be dismissed, especially newcomers.



Indeed, at the beginning of a career immediately after graduation, the main employment of a journalist falls on such routine and boring articles as financial reviews and formal sports stories or even obituaries — tasks that do not require much creativity.



For British journalists, the risk of losing their jobs and being replaced by a robotic system is very insignificant, according to researchers from Oxford.



To confirm the results of statistics, the Air Force created an infographic that matches the risk for different professions (366 professions were analyzed in total), which can be replaced by robots.



Thus, it became clear that the highest risk in such professions as a telephone agent, legal secretary and typewriter. Least of all, robots threaten store managers and hotel owners. Journalists were ranked 285, and the risk of job loss due to robots was only 11% .

How was this data formulated?

Researchers identified 9 of the most important qualities of each profession. Those professions that are more in need of "human" skills are less likely to be at risk. In general, over the next 20 years, 35% of occupations may be seriously threatened by machines.



However, automation has a number of positive aspects. According to Kevin Roose, the automation of writing articles is good news for journalists.

“Not only am I not afraid of losing my job in favor of a piece of metal, but I also believe that automated systems are the best thing that has happened to journalism in recent years.”

Now the system of AI allows you to work only with certain areas of writing articles: short notes with structured data, which are built on a specific pattern.



Victoria Nicks, technical consultant and director of Decoded Everything , thinks that using such programs is a very reasonable decision.

“This technology is used by Google to select the most appropriate information for your request. In addition, there are artificial intelligence algorithms that define diseases more accurately than doctors. ”

She also believes that there will always be a place for journalist people, because “ATMs could not completely replace cashiers at banks”.

Ethics of Robot Journalists

The question of ethics, however, remains relevant and very serious. In particular, the uncertainty raises the question of copyright, because a lot depends on how to collect data. Information found on the Internet does not mean that you can simply take and insert it into your article, at least without the prior consent of the author.



You should also pay attention to the algorithm for structuring information. In order for the article to sound natural, it must be accompanied by appropriate vocabulary and style. The most difficult aspect is how to teach the robot to structure and present information in accordance with human thinking.



All these nuances greatly affect the massive introduction of robotic systems in journalism.



It is difficult to deny that the advancement of automated systems in journalism, in addition to a certain risk, also introduces a large number of new opportunities and is uniquely capable of facilitating some aspects of work.