"Robot journalism" is good for journalism in the same way that outsourcing is good for programmers and engineers: drudge code entry that needs to be done can be identified and contracted out at a much lower rate, therefore saving the in-house programmers to do innovative, business-expanding work.<p>However, that reality doesn't always follow, depending on the dynamics of the business and the forward-thinkingness of management. And this is in engineering/technical companies that are making viable amounts of money. Will the managers who run cratering news companies have the same foresight? Not going to hold my breath.<p>(note: I fully support the automation of writing/observation of digital feeds...I'm just skeptical that the journalism industry will apply it either efficiently or in a way that benefits their human workers)
The next attack on journalism might be great curation, not robots. Why ? because no single human has the capability to write the best story in any given case.Add to that the capabilities of unpaid bloggers, industry insiders and the like, you get a serious threat to journalism.<p>Alas ,there are no great content curation tools AFAIK.But when there will be...
On a totally different note this startup, Automated Insights, is based in Durham NC (where my startup Spreedly is also based). There are all the elements of a great startup scene; a clustering of talent, a decent incubator that does two sessions per year at around $150K per startup, cheap real estate, excellent food and affordable living. The greater area has 3 good schools. There are numerous other startups here but I can't help but give a plug for what's happening as I know many developers here wrestle with work/life balance. Right now it's very good in Durham. Biggest drawback is lack of local seed funding but things like AngelList are making that less of an issue than a few years ago.
Robot journalism isn't going to be great for journalists. Publications will quickly gravitate towards the content farm model where every article will be accompanied by 20 - 30 keyword permutations and no overhead for articles that don't pull social media traffic/shares/links. You can already see companies like Mashable pushing the limits of doing this by hand.<p>I wonder if/how Google will differentiate between automated news vs machine-generated spam?
I don't see how this is useful. It's just converting some short table of statistics into an unnecessarily long paragraph in natural language.
Whatever a robot can do, they can do a million times an hour.<p>Next we'll have robot comments on robot blogs. We already have impersonal birthday wishes on fb -- where you can make an app that automatically wishes happy birthday. And the recipient can install an app to automatically thank everyone. It's as I was half joking in the past -- guys will outsource their robots to have sex with their wives' robots.
I wonder if you got a large dataset of these short human written articles, and trained a generative model to produce them character by character. This was done on wikipedia: <a href="https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~ilya/fourth.cgi" rel="nofollow">https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~ilya/fourth.cgi</a>