News Writers: Have You Heard?

Confirmed and budding news reporters have a new contender to deal with: a computer.

I had no knowledge of this until today. In fact, if you had told me that a computer is writing new articles, I would have laughed in your face, remembering my experiments with the “google translator” and similar tools.

But this seems to work. Automated Insight’s computers are not getting ready to churn out new reports. No. They are already doing it. I’ve heard that these reporting-machines have written up to one billion articles last year.

Their style is very AP; no flourish, no story, only facts. But those are bundled nicely into articles, mostly concerning the economy and the stock market, and of which no one would suspect that no human has written them.

According to what I’ve heard on NPR this morning, the programmers are working on the computers’ style.

It makes me wonder if soon, only in-depth articles will still be written by breathing reporters; everything else might be produced by machines.

What a strange world our kids are growing into….

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