Automated Journalism: A Robot’s Tale
As a senior almost at the completion of her fall semester, job searching will be upon me soon. This means polishing up my resume, adding content to my portfolio and filling out tedious job applications. I expect to compete with elite journalism majors in the field who will make the same walk down that stage, as I soon will. But after learning more about the journalism industry, more specifically the technology being used in the industry, it seems I could possibly have another competitor in my way — and they’re not of the living.
In June of 2014, the Associated Press announced they would use automation technology (aka using robots) to write stories concerning corporate earnings reports. They would do so by partnering up with Automated Insights, a language generation software that “lets you turn data into text at any scale and in any format.”
A year later, the Associated Press revealed they are “now automatically generating more than 3,000 stories about U.S. corporate earnings each quarter, a tenfold increase over what AP reporters and editors created previously.” The Associated Press would later go on to use robot journalism to cover business, sports stories and other pieces related to data crunching.
The AP is not the only player who is getting their hands dirty with robot journalism. Forbes, Bloomberg and the Los Angeles Times to name a few have used automation technology in the past for similar content that requires a lot of data research. As a journalist who will enter the professional workforce soon, I’m quite skeptical of using a robot to produce content.
Philiana Patterson, former assistant business editor for the AP, backs up my skepticism: “I wouldn’t expect a good journalist to not be skeptical.” Phew, at least I’m a “good journalist.” But is that enough? How will there be room for me? I’m picturing a bunch of robots sitting in the newsrooms rather than actual people — someone tell me I’m wrong.
CUTS OR NO CUTS?
In 2014, Lou Ferrara, the Associated Press’ former managing editor, said using robots would not mean job cuts. He believed this opportunity to use automated journalism would allow journalists themselves to spend more time doing valuable research on valuable stories, rather than wasting time on content that requires a lot of data research and little writing skills. Bloomberg’s editor-in-chief, John Micklethwait, also supported this idea, saying a potential benefit “includes freeing up journalists to do more investigative work and analysis — types of content where human input is essential.”
In fact, the AP suggests that automated journalism will actually create more jobs rather than cut them. This opportunity in the field has been called “the evolution of data journalism,” a different “genre” that can potentially bring in more writers that focus on a different beat. According to the AP, a data journalist is responsible for “build[ing] newsroom tools for managing massive data and document dumps, crunch[ing] the numbers to discover high-impact stories and creat[ing] new types of content.”
But even so, we’re talking about robots here, who can mimic our journalistic skills without even paying for a degree. Bleacher Report offers a chilling perspective:
“If you’re doing something that a machine could be taught to do — even a machine more sophisticated than the ones you know exist today — you should probably be thinking about what else you might do. That machine is probably coming.”
Let’s hope there never comes a time where robots begin to mock journalists’ tones and emotion when writing a story. If you ask me, that would be automated journalism’s worst mistake. If you thought deciphering between robot talk and human journalist was already tough, who knows what we’d be dealing with then.
WHO UNDERSTANDS IT?
Media Shift addressed the cultural resistance to this change, claiming that journalists “will understandably feel threatened” as automated journalism works its way further into storytelling. Maybe robots are capable of taking some stress off the plates of journalists, but isn’t that our job… to write the news, on whichever topic that may be? (And obviously have a semi-stressful time doing it)
I think what is even scarier is if a robot makes a mistake, which we learn it will not do twice, “it’s not the robot’s fault, it’s the one who has built the algorithms.” So, robots can be credited for writing stories, but they can’t be held accountable. Interesting.
Robots aside, at the end of the year I’ll walk down that stage, degree in hand and I won’t be thinking about them stealing my job. Until it happens, subtly, much later down the road. And I’ll think back to this post and say, “I told you so.”
