No, Journalism is not ‘Safe’ from Automation
If you’ve been following the whole ‘automation will take human jobs’ fiasco, you may have considered going into journalism. After all, the stats say it’s a safe choice. I mean, the BBC says it only has an 8% chance of being replaced by robots. NPR says it’s got an 11.4% chance. Will Robots Take My Job gives it an 11% probability of being replaced.
Above: What ‘Will Robots Take My Job’ thinks is the likelihood of reporters and correspondents being replaced by AI.
Doesn’t that mean it’s a good career choice?
Well, no it doesn’t. And the reason for this is very simple:
The sites are wrong. Or at least misleading.
Journalism is not safe from automation. In fact, for most journalists it may actually be one of the riskiest careers around.
Why?
Well, the stats kind of assume one thing. They assume that everyone in journalism is doing long form, investigative reporting that involves a decent amount of research and many interviews from people involved in the subject. You know, like this article about how an infamous drug lord was taken by the secret service after a years long investigation and battle. Or the various videos Mark Brown makes to analyse video games in Game Maker’s Toolkit.
Above: This video (somewhat ironically) isn’t going to be created by AI anytime soon.
And yes, these articles and videos are not easy for an AI to write. The skill set there is just too varied for the technology we have at the time.
However, here’s the problem. This is a tiny percentage of what journalists do nowadays. Only a tiny percentage of journalists spend all their time writing original content or doing in depth investigations.
The majority on the other hand, they act like a walking RSS feed curator. They’re the ones posting that endless stream of video game news on sites like IGN and Kotaku. They’re the ones reporting sports results in whatever way they can. They’re reporting the weather. Or whatever Twitter rumour is going around about the celebrity of the moment.
Above: None of these articles seem like they couldn’t be written by a computer system. Though fortunately, GoNintendo and Nintendo Everything are mostly contributed to by their owners, who are obviously safe from automation.
Guess what?
This kind of work is easy to automate. What’s more, it’s actually being automated right now.
Seriously, look at this project where large sports sites are using automated systems to write articles about sports game results. Or this one where the Associated Press uses automation to create stories on corporate earnings.
That’s the sort of journalism most reporters are doing at the moment. Not the next Watergate investigation or major expose. Rewriting press releases and creating cookie cutter pieces about statistical data.
And that’s what is being automated right now. Don’t think they can avoid it by all going into editorial writing either. Those jobs exist, but they’re already rare and will only get more competitive as the years go on. Not everyone can start a major news investigation, especially not in an era where investigative journalism doesn’t make the cash it used to and cookie cutter crap does well on social media websites.
So no, journalism is not a ‘safe’ career where automation is concerned. The stats saying you have a 11% chance of seeing your job replaced apply to editorial writers and columnists, not the average grunt post bog standard news based on facts and figures.
