Bot News Ahead!
(Image courtesy gcn.com)
It is estimated that by 2025 about 90% of all news will be created by Artificial Intelligence (AI). The rise of machines that comprehend, analyze and decipher news for human consumption is eerily like the movie I, Robot, where AI started making decisions of what was good for their humans.
But allusions aside, most of us have read at least one news article generated by AI. Most big media companies currently use AI-generated news for data-driven, number rich content like sports, earnings reports or the elections. While there is an obvious upside from the costs, efficiency and task complexity angle, AI news may not reflect the rich contextual communication that separates us from the machines.
The Post is said to have churned out around 850 articles for the 2016 elections, during its first year of using this technology. Other names like Bloomberg, The Washington Post, BBC, The New York Times aren’t too far behind and have successfully deployed their bots in curating and creating content.
It is interesting to note that some media houses use “automated journalism” to replace humans and increase content and coverage. But others use technology to increase depth and insight. Here there is a collaboration between humans and bots, where data crunching and trend spotting is done by the AI to be woven into a rich story by the human journalists.
It may only be a matter of time till machine learning enables bots to understand and follow the nuances of languages and use that to enrich the “narrative news”.
“I foresee that the new leader of the newsroom will not be the experienced journalist … but the computer engineer.” — Noam Lemelshtrich Latar
As communicators, we will see a paradigm shift in our media outreach. Our news may need to be more data-rich and will need to carry relevant keywords for scans to be categorized as breaking news. While automated journalists comb social media, RSS feeds and websites across the globe, it may warrant the need to push these stories on as many digital media as possible, to be seen and carried.
But would it mean that we keep the human touch out of our pitch notes to establish a more neutral story for replication across multiple countries and languages? Or would the automated journalists learn to spin stories without the restrictive template-based publishing and add to it a dash of personality?
The answer may just be evolving over the next news piece by a bot.
About the Author
Mallika is a communications professional and a volunteer at Humans For AI, a non-profit focused on building a more diverse workforce for the future leveraging AI technologies. Learn more about us and join us as we embark on this journey to make a difference!
