By Robin Ewing
In the last three months, Apple made US$18 billion and news agency Associated Press produced 3,000 stories written by a computer program. One of these was the report about Apple’s billions, published minutes after the quarterly earnings were released.
Last summer, the AP started using the automated article-creation system from Automated Insights, which published 300 million stories in 2013 and estimated a billion for last year.
And AP isn’t the first media organization to publish stories without human bylines. Pew Research Center reported in its State of the News Media last year that a growing list of media organizations, such as Forbes Magazine, are publishing stories written with algorithms created by the company Narrative Science.
And while the AP is using a computer program to write corporate earnings stories, the LA Times uses one to publish stories about earthquakes and the Big Ten Network uses an algorithm to publish sports recaps.
AP swears robots aren’t replacing human journalists, instead freeing them up to do more important things. But Narrative Science co-founder Kristian Hammond estimates that by 2027, around 90 percent of stories will be automated.
There are plenty of articles out there forecasting the loss of millions of jobs to automation (The Telegraph & even Oxford University) but so far, journalists don’t seem to be worried that the newsroom of the future will end up looking like this Japanese museum. (I recommend clicking on that. It’s weird.)