There’s a greater acceptance of the potential for artificial intelligence, or robo journalism, in newsrooms that follows consumer trends and business models for journalism around the world.
Keeping in view, a text-generating “bot” nicknamed Tobi produced nearly 40,000 news stories about the results of the November 2018 elections in Switzerland for the media giant Tamedia in just five minutes.
A similar automated program called Heliograf has enabled the Washington Post daily to cover some 500 election races, along with local sports and business, since 2014.
News organizations say the bots are not intended to displace human reporters or editors but rather to help free them from the most monotonous tasks, such as sports results and earnings reports.
The Los Angeles Times developed a “quakebot” that quickly distributes news articles on temblors in the region and also uses an automated system as part of its Homicide Report.
Rival news agency Reuters last year announced the launch of Lynx Insight, which uses automated data analysis to identify trends and anomalies and to suggest stories reporters should write.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution used a data journalism team to uncover 450 cases of doctors who were brought before medical regulators or courts for sexual misconduct, finding that nearly half remained licensed to practice medicine.
The newspaper used machine learning, an artificial intelligence tool, to analyze each case and assign a “probability rating” on sexual misconduct, which was then reviewed by a team of journalists.
Researchers at the nonprofit center OpenAI announced they had developed an automatic text generator so good that it is keeping details private for now.
There are many positive applications of AI in the newsroom, but that for now, most programs handle “the most boring” stories.