Beta comes Wordsmith: we can try the “robot journalist” – The Republic

MAN is likely to be replaced by a machine? Until now, this fear has been relegated to science fiction films and novels. Isaac Asimov in his masterpiece I, Robot already predicted that robots would take care not only of tasks related to industrial production, as now happens for some time, but also to support the men in their family life, social and even politics. Since then artificial intelligence has come a long way: recently Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft with Bill Gates has invested a large sum of money to create the perfect robot-brain, can even pass the exam maturity. Now, the new frontier of robotics, also affects the journalistic world, bringing with it consequences that scare many reporters.

The company Automated Insights launched Wordsmith Beta, a version open to the public software that automatically generates written content, and customizable, to from the data. The technology is not new, in fact, has long been used by newspapers such as Associated Press (mid-2014) and Yahoo! to auto Financial Reports and sports items, but the applications of this new technology are potentially endless. Through analysis of data, which must be loaded on the site, the software develops a detailed account or a full article. In a second step you can customize the content, so that only the text. It is sufficient to require access to the platform to test its self-generation. For now it is just a test: the final version of the site, in fact, will be launched in January and will be completely free (no request for access).

To understand the success of the software just take the example of how it was used by the Associated Press. Wordsmith generated by the American agency more than 3000 financial reports in a single quarter. Over the past two years, Wordsmith has produced more content than any other company in the world: just last year created more than one billion pieces with a team of less than 50 employees.

According to a study by Christer Clerwall (PDF), which referred to some people both articles written by robots that journalists in the flesh, “there is no significant difference between a content produced by software and one written by a human being. “The criticism in the study, however, are those that you have selected a number of news and a sample of respondents too narrow to be really significant.

It’s the end of journalism? No, because, unlike the writer, the robot does not think, or at least, he does not “outside the box”. To produce quality content software requires a high degree of customization that can not no reference to the human being. This is why It is considered more suitable to be used for financial reports, traffic reports, weather reports and in general for works Date of journalism. It is certainly not good for the drafting of articles of fantasy. The technology, in fact, is based on numbers, time and data and can not replace the creative part of journalistic work.

Arguments:

robot

AI

Journalism

Data journalism

Starring:

Wordsmith

Associated Press

Yahoo