The Rise of the Robot Reporter
The Rise of the Robot Reporter
By Jaclyn Peiser Feb. 5, 2019
As reporters and editors find themselves the victims of
layoffs at digital publishers and traditional newspaper chains alike,
journalism generated by machine is on the rise.
Roughly a third of the content published by Bloomberg
News uses some form of automated technology. The system used by the company,
Cyborg, is able to assist reporters in churning out thousands of articles on
company earnings reports each quarter.
The program can dissect a financial report the moment it
appears and spit out an immediate news story that includes the most pertinent
facts and figures. And unlike business reporters, who find working on that kind
of thing a snooze, it does so without complaint.
Untiring and accurate, Cyborg helps Bloomberg in its race
against Reuters, its main rival in the field of quick-twitch business financial
journalism, as well as giving it a fighting chance against a more recent player
in the information race, hedge funds, which use artificial intelligence to
serve their clients fresh facts.
“The financial markets are ahead of others in this,” said
John Micklethwait, the editor in chief of Bloomberg.
In addition to covering company earnings for Bloomberg,
robot reporters have been prolific producers of articles on minor league
baseball for The Associated Press, high school football for The Washington Post
and earthquakes for The Los Angeles Times.
Examples of machine-generated articles from The
Associated Press:
TYSONS CORNER, Va. (AP) — MicroStrategy Inc. (MSTR) on
Tuesday reported fourth-quarter net income of $3.3 million, after reporting a
loss in the same period a year earlier.
MANCHESTER, N.H. (AP) — Jonathan Davis hit for the cycle,
as the New Hampshire Fisher Cats topped the Portland Sea Dogs 10-3 on Tuesday.
Last week, The Guardian’s Australia edition published its
first machine-assisted article, an account of annual political donations to the
country’s political parties. And Forbes recently announced that it was testing
a tool called Bertie to provide reporters with rough drafts and story templates.
As the use of artificial intelligence has become a part
of the industry’s toolbox, journalism executives say it is not a threat to
human employees. Rather, the idea is to allow journalists to spend more time on
substantive work.
“The work of journalism is creative, it’s about
curiosity, it’s about storytelling, it’s about digging and holding governments
accountable, it’s critical thinking, it’s judgment — and that is where we want
our journalists spending their energy,” said Lisa Gibbs, the director of news
partnerships for The A.P.
The A.P. was an early adopter when it struck a deal in
2014 with Automated Insights, a technology company specializing in language
generation software that produces billions of machine-generated stories a year.
In addition to leaning on the software to generate minor
league and college game stories, The A.P., like Bloomberg, has used it to beef
up its coverage of company earnings reports. Since joining forces with
Automated Insights, The A.P. has gone from producing 300 articles on earnings
reports per quarter to 3,700.
The Post has an in-house robot reporter called Heliograf,
which demonstrated its usefulness with its coverage of the 2016 Summer Olympic
Games and the 2016 elections. Last year, thanks to Heliograf, The Post won in
the category of Excellence in Use of Bots at the annual Global Biggies Awards,
which recognize accomplishments in the use of big data and artificial
intelligence. (As if to make journalists jittery, the Biggies ceremony took
place at Columbia University’s Pulitzer Hall.)
Jeremy Gilbert, the director of strategic initiatives at
The Post, said the company also used A.I. to promote articles with a local
orientation in topics like political races to readers in specific regions — a
practice known as geo-targeting.
“When you start to talk about mass media, with national
or international reach, you run the risk of losing the interest of readers who
are interested in stories on their smaller communities,” Mr. Gilbert said. “So
we asked, ‘How can we scale our expertise?’”
The A.P., The Post and Bloomberg have also set up
internal alerts to signal anomalous bits of data. Reporters who see the alert
can then determine if there is a bigger story to be written by a human being.
During the Olympics, for instance, The Post set up alerts on Slack, the workplace
messaging system, to inform editors if a result was 10 percent above or below
an Olympic world record.
A.I. journalism is not as simple as a shiny robot banging
out copy. A lot of work goes into the front end, with editors and writers
meticulously crafting several versions of a story, complete with text for
different outcomes. Once the data is in — for a weather event, a baseball game
or an earnings report — the system can create an article.
But machine-generated stories are not infallible. For an
earnings report article, for instance, software systems may meet their match in
companies that cleverly choose figures in an effort to garner a more favorable
portrayal than the numbers warrant. At Bloomberg, reporters and editors try to
prepare Cyborg so that it will not be spun by such tactics.
A.I. in newsrooms may also go beyond the production of
rote articles.
“I hope we’ll see A.I. tools become a productivity tool
in the practice of reporting and finding clues,” said Hilary Mason, the general
manager for machine learning at Cloudera, a data management software company.
“When you do data analysis, you can see anomalies and patterns using A.I. And a
human journalist is the right person to understand and figure out.”
The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones are experimenting
with the technology to help with various tasks, including the transcription of
interviews or helping journalists identify “deep fakes,” the convincingly
fabricated images generated through A.I.
“Maybe a few years ago A.I. was this new shiny technology
used by high tech companies, but now it’s actually becoming a necessity,” said
Francesco Marconi, the head of research and development at The Journal. “I
think a lot of the tools in journalism will soon by powered by artificial
intelligence.”
The New York Times said it had no plans for
machine-generated news articles, but the company has experimented with using
A.I. to personalize newsletters, help with comment moderation and identify
images as it digitizes its archive.
Previous technological advances have rendered moot a
number of jobs that were once essential to the journalism industry, such as
Linotype operator. But reporters and editors have not yet been tempted to smash
the programs now taking care of some of the busy work that once fell to them.
“When you look at the ways things are laid out and
printed and produced and distributed, a lot of those functions have been
replaced with technology,” said Nastaran Mohit, the organizing director for the
News Guild of New York. She added that she did not consider A.I. a threat to newsroom
workers, while also noting that the guild monitors emerging technologies to
make sure that hypothesis holds true.
Mr. Marconi of The Journal agreed, likening the addition
of A.I. in newsrooms to the introduction of the telephone. “It gives you more access,
and you get more information quicker,” he said. “It’s a new field, but
technology changes. Today it’s A.I., tomorrow it’s blockchain, and in 10 years
it will be something else. What does not change is the journalistic standard.”
Marc Zionts, the chief executive of Automated Insights,
said that machines were a long way from being able to replace flesh-and-blood
reporters and editors. He added that his daughter was a journalist in South
Dakota — and although he had not advised her to leave her job, he had told her
to get acquainted with the latest technology.
“If you are a non-learning, non-adaptive person — I don’t
care what business you’re in — you will have a challenging career,” Mr. Zionts
said.
For Patch, a nationwide news organization devoted to
local news, A.I. provides an assist to its 110 staff reporters and numerous
freelancers who cover about 800 communities, especially in their coverage of
the weather. In a given week, more than 3,000 posts on Patch — 5 to 10 percent
of its output — are machine-generated, said the company’s chief executive,
Warren St. John.
In addition to giving reporters more time to pursue their
interests, machine journalism comes with an added benefit for editors.
“One thing I’ve noticed,” Mr. St. John said, “is that our
A.I.-written articles have zero typos.”
A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 4,
2019, on Page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: As A.I. Reporters
Arrive, The Other Kind Hangs In.
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