Journalists: Smart Software Is Learning How to Be a Real Journalist
July 15, 2018
I read “Why Bots Taking Over (Some) Journalism Could Be a Good Thing.” I love optimists who lack a good understanding of how numerical recipes work. The notion of “artificial intelligence” is just cool like something out of science fiction like “Ralph 124C 41+” except for the wrong headed predictions. In my 50 year work career, technologies are not revolutions. Technologies appear, die, reform, and then interact, often in surprising ways. Then one day, a clever person identifies a “paradigm shift” or “a big thing.”
The problem with smart software which seems obvious to me boils down to:
- The selection of numerical recipes to use
- The threshold settings or the Bayesian best guesses that inform the system
- The order in which the processes are implemented within the system.
There are other issues, but these provide a reasonable checklist. What does on under the kimono is quite important.
The write up states:
If robots can take over the grunt work, which in many cases they can, then that has the potential to lower media organizations’ costs and enable them to spend a greater proportion of their advertising income on more serious material. That’s terrible news for anybody whose current job is to trawl Twitter for slightly smutty tweets by reality TV show contestants, but great news for organizations funding the likes of Guardian journalist Carole Cadwalladr, who broke the Facebook / Cambridge Analytica scandal. Isn’t it?
Good question. I also learned:
Technology can help with a lot of basic reporting. For example, the UK Press Association’s Radar project (Reporters And Data And Robots) aims to automate a lot of local news reporting by pulling information from government agencies, local authorities and the police. It’ll still be overseen by “skilled human journalists”, at least for the foreseeable future, but the actual writing will be automated: it uses a technology called Natural Language Generation, or NLG for short. Think Siri, Alexa or the recent Google Duplex demos that mimic human speech, but dedicated to writing rather than speaking.
I recall reading this idea to steal:
In fact, human reporters will continue to play a vital role in the process, and Rogers doesn’t see this changing anytime soon. It’s humans that make the decision on which datasets to analyze. Humans also “define” the story templates – for example, by deciding that if a certain variable in one region is above a particular threshold, then that’s a strong indicator that the data will make a good news story.
Now back to the points in the checklist. In the mad rush to reduce costs, provide more and better news, and create opportunities to cover certain stories more effectively, who is questioning the prioritization of content from an available stream, the selection of items from the stream, and the evaluation of the data pulled from the stream for automatic story generation?
My thought is that it will be the developers who are deciding what to do in one of those whiteboard meetings lubricated with latte and fizzy water.
The business models which once sustained “real” journalism focused on media battles, yellow journalism, interesting advertising deals, and the localized monopolies. (I once worked for such an outfit.)
With technology concentration a natural consequence of online information services, I would not get too excited about the NLG and NLP (natural language generation and natural language processing services). These capabilities for smart software will arrive. But I think the functionality will arrive in dribs and drabs. One day an MBA or electrical engineer turned business school professor will explain what happened.
What’s lost? Typing, hanging out in the newspaper lunch room, gossip, and hitting the bar a block from the office. Judgment? Did I leave out judgment. Probably not important. What’s important that I almost forgot? Getting rid of staff, health coverage, pensions, vacations, and sick leave. Software doesn’t get sick even though it may arrive in a questionable condition.
Stephen E Arnold, July 15, 2018
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
