News Selected by Robots – With editors and reporters becoming victims of mass layoffs at traditional newspaper chains and digital publishers alike, machine-generated journalism is now gaining momentum,
About a third of Bloomberg News’ published content makes use of some type of automated technology. The company Cyborg uses a system that helps reporters churn out tons of articles on the reports on company earnings every quarter.
This program has the ability to dissect financial report right when it appears and create a news story right away that includes all the crucial figures and facts. The beauty of this is that it does everything without complaints, unlike the usual business reports that often end up snoozing when doing such a job.
Accurate and untiring at the same time, Cyborg lends Bloomberg a helping hand in the race to win against Reuters, their biggest rival as far as quick-twitch business financial journalism is concerned.
It also gives them an edge against hedge funds, the latest players in the world of information race that make use of artificial intelligence to provide fresh facts to their clients.
News Selected by Robots Is Here Already
According to Bloomberg’s editor in chief, John Micklethwait, the financial markets are more ahead in the field than others. Aside from covering Bloomberg’s company earnings robot reports are also found to be prolific creators of articles for The Associated Press about minor league baseball, The Washington Post about high school football, and The Los Angeles Times about earthquakes.
Just recently, the Australia edition of The Guardian published its first-ever machine-assisted article that discussed the yearly political donations to the political parties of the country. Recently, Forbes also announced that it is testing Bertie, a tool to provide the reporters with story templates and rough drafts.
The use of AI has played a huge role in the toolbox of the journalism industry. But, according to journalism executives, it isn’t a threat to human employees. Instead, the idea enables journalists to spend more time on substantive work.
Lisa Gibbs, A.P’s news partnerships director, said that the work of journalism is all about curiosity, storytelling, holding and digging the governments accountable, judgment, critical thinking, and being creative. She added that it’s where they want their journalists to spend their energy.
AI journalism isn’t as simple as shiny robots banging out a copy.
Lots of work goes into the front end, with writers and editors meticulously creating some versions of a certain story, complete with texts for various outcomes. If the data is in, for an earnings report, baseball game or weather event, the system may create articles.
However, stories that are machine-generated aren’t infallible.
For earnings report articles, software systems can meet their match in the companies that choose figures cleverly to garner a more favorable portrayal that what the numbers warrant. Editors and reporters at Bloomberg try to prepare cyborg so it won’t be spun by these tactics.
Aside from giving reporters more time in pursuing their interests, machine journalism basically comes with extra benefit for the editors. One of these is that News Selected by Robots will have no typos.
