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Robots writing the news?

RobotWhile merrily crunching on my cereal this morning, a radio story made me pause in horror: robots could soon be writing the news.

A slightly alarming prospect for those of us working in journalism.

Radio 4's Today programme, written by real human journalists as far as I know, featured an interview with Dr Kristian Hammond from the Intelligent Information Laboratory in Illinois. His Stats Monkey program produces sports news without any human involvement, based on data from baseball games.

“We have yet to have anybody read a piece of our copy and think it was written by a machine,” says Hammond. “Our goal is to take journalistic skills, journalistic judgements, journalistic values and embody those in automated systems.”

Stats Monkey

Stats Monkey works by analyzing changes in win probability and game scores and using a decision tree to select a narrative arc for the news piece: from an underdog victory to a last-minute reversal of fortune. It then 'writes' the story from a library of set phrases used to describe games. The results aren't half bad.

baseballSports stories are a cinch for robo-writers because they are so data-heavy (Hammond pointed out the economic journalism is also an exciting area for the Laboratory.)

I suspect automated writing for general news is a long way off, or even impossible, due to the variety of stories in your average News at Ten bulletin. An earthquake or a political speech can't be summed up by the half-time atmosphere and the final score.

Hammond's company do have one project called News At Seven that generates regular news, but it looks less likely to nab journalists' jobs. Rather than writing, it crawls the web for stories from news agencies and blogs and 'presents' them in a virtual studio, read by avatars through text-to-speech technology. Happily for Jon Snow and pals, News At Seven can't fool you that you're watching something made by people. It rather serves to illustrate the fact that text-to-speech software still has a way to go.

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Submitted by Louise Ridley

Could only improve a tabloid.

Sat, 2010-08-14 16:22
Shadowwolf

I suppose it just illustrates the formulaic level of sports journalism that is so simplistic a set of stock phrases is all that's needed.

I also like the bit he says about journalistic values given how so few seem to know what that means anymore, only asking the nice safe questions and never fact checking.

Anyhoo I'm sure the bots would be a giant leap in quality over tabloid journalism, might even get some actual news in them over all the gossip and celeb hack stories.