Robot writing

English: Los Angeles Times building in downtown Los Angeles, California (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I expect that some journalists read the news that the Los Angeles Times has a robot which break news stories^[1] about earthquakes in the area within three minutes of them occurring with dismay.

The robot collects data from a number of different sources and inserts them into a template and which is then published online. The robot is also set up to report crimes in the city.

But, this is not the only robot which has been developed to write news stories. Techradar covered this in an article^[2] (April 2013) where it highlighted a number of companies which have developed applications to use your data to create stories for you automatically. The robot analyses the data, creates a narrative from its interpretation and then publishes an article. You can see that this might be useful in a fat moving environment such as the financial markets.

Those with ‘Luddite tendencies’ might be thinking they will be out of a job when their work is taken over by a robot. But, the types of stories which the robot produces without human intervention are probably best carried out by a robot rather than by a journalist. It sounds as though the robot is allowing journalists more time to concentrate on the stories which do require more intervention and investigation.

It is difficult to see a robot developing a rapport with a human while they interview them for a story. That is something which human journalists are going to be much more skilled in carrying out.

Also, it might take some time to program a robot to understand human emotions. Yes, they can be entirely logical when dealing with facts and data. But, can they read someone’s body language, tone of voice and ‘read between the lines’ with what they are saying? I doubt it, yet.

Nevertheless, the media world is changing fast and as less people read printed newspapers and magazines and the publishers seek to cut costs of their print operations, you can see why creating a robot to write the news stories could be quite an attractive option for a publisher.

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[1] "BBC News - Robot writes LA Times earthquake breaking news article." 2014. 22 Mar. 2014 <http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-26614051>

[2] "Could robots be the writers of the future? | News | TechRadar." 2013. 22 Mar. 2014 <http://www.techradar.com/us/news/computing/could-robots-be-the-writers-of-the-future--1141399