The Potential of AI Journalism
July 12, 2016
Most of us are familiar with the concept of targeted advertising, but are we ready for targeted news? Personalized paragraphs within news stories is one development writer Jonathan Holmes predicts in, “AI is Already Making Inroads Into Journalism but Could it Win a Pulitzer?” at the Guardian.
Even now, the internet is full of both clickbait and news articles generated by algorithms. Such software is also producing quarterly earnings reports, obituaries, even poetry and fiction. Now that it has been established that, at least, some software can write better than some humans, researchers are turning to another question: What can AI writers do that humans cannot? Holmes quotes Reg Chua, of Thomson Reuters:
“‘I think it may well be that in the future a machine will win not so much for its written text, but by covering an important topic with five high quality articles and also 500,000 versions for different people.’ Imagine an article telling someone how local council cuts will affect their family, specifically, or how they personally are affected by a war happening in a different country. ‘I think the results might show up in the next couple of years,’ Caswell agrees. ‘It’s something that could not be done by a human writer.’”
The “Caswell” above is David Caswell, a fellow at the University of Missouri’s Donald W Reynolds Journalism Institute. Holmes also describes:
“In Caswell’s system, Structured Stories, the ‘story’ is not a story at all, but a network of information that can be assembled and read as copy, infographics or any other format, almost like musical notes. Any bank of information – from court reports to the weather – could eventually be plugged into a database of this kind. The potential for such systems is enormous.”
Yes, it is; we are curious to see where this technology is headed. In the meantime, we should all remember not to believe everything we read… was written by a human.
Cynthia Murrell, July 12, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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