No More Jobs For Journalists: Robots To Write Stories Soon
The first wave of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has started creating waves in the newsroom – in chatbots, automated reporting systems and machine learning techniques which are passed through massive data sets to write initial news reports.
Media houses are making investments in AI and it is sure to hit jobs in the media industry. Automation and AI in the newsroom and the next few could be decisive for the jobs in the industry.
Google has provided British news agency Press Association around Rs 5.25 crore to build software that will gather and write nearly 30,000 local stories a month. The software will automate local reporting with large public databases from government agencies or local law enforcement.
Associated Press and Thomson Reuters are using machine learning algorithms to write stories and The New York Times plans to automate its comment moderation.
So, jobs in the media industry are at stake al AI-powered software will become common in the newsroom. Simple, factual-based news reporting and gathering will require more human input and aid cost-cutting.
Xiaofeng Wang, Senior Analyst at global research firm Forrester told IANS, “There are already bots designed for research purposes, but they act more like assistants to humans. When designing these bots, humans can define the purpose clearly and imagine a personality for it but the AI technology today still has limitations.”
There are dynamic changes happening in every industry and AI will take up writing stories in the future.
Ramesh Menon, senior journalist told IANS, “But the best stories will come from writer-journalists who can put in fine detail, empathy, drama, colour and analysis into their stories. What is good is that we can tomorrow get robots to do the routine stuff that today takes 80 per cent of the journalists’ time.”
This however, will help journalists to focus more on big stories and put all their time and energy into reaching out to right people for the story and analyse it better. Yonhap’s “Soccerbot” had a successful test in covering all games of the 2016-17 EPL season. It produced a total of 380 automatic experimental articles, each within one or two seconds of a game’s end.
Menon added, “It may not be such a bad thing as we think. Good journalists will always have jobs; no one can replace them in the world of tomorrow as they would be needed more than ever.”
Meanwhile, according to Wang, AI would help journalists work more efficiently if they know how to use the bots. Bots are not ready to replace journalists yet, it would be replacing the journalist’s assistant maybe.”
