When people were talking about a milestone in the history of the development of news writing robots, it has to be said that the story occurred at 6:25 am on March 17, 2014. The reporter and programmer of the Los Angeles Times, Ken Schwencke, was awakened by the energetic vibrations of the earthquake. He turned on the laptop and found that an algorithm called Quakebot had already sent him an email and attached a well-written news report.
This screenshot is from Andrey Miroshnichenko's article "AI to Bypass Creativity. Will Robots Replace Journalists? (The Answer Is "Yes")"
Quakebot, which was written by Schwencke, has been around for two years. Quakebot extracts data from the US Geological Survey’s earthquake notification service and conducts a comparative analysis, then inserts the data into the applied sentence patterns to prepare the news report. Therefore, it took LAT only eight minutes to publish the news report, and it is also becoming the first media to report the earthquake, much earlier than any human reporter (Andrey, pp. 4-5, 2018).
The Associated Press was also the first media company to use robotic reporters. In 2014, the Associated Press teamed up with the founders of Wordsmith to publish quarterly financial mechanization. Before the quarterly earnings report with Artificial Intelligence, manual reports can only generate hundreds of copies per month, and thousands of stories need to be completed. According to Australasian Policing (2018), Lisa Gibbs (Director of News Partnerships of The Associated Press) describes the role of AI in the newsroom. She said that AI is mainly used to organize mechanized content such as income reports and sports scores and to help organizations expand the number of stories. Besides, artificial intelligence can help journalists convert their original news content into a variety of different forms, for example, printing, online networks, social media, etc. This kind of help will allow reporters to save more time to report relevant news.
When Gibbs answered the trends in the future news industry, she said: “We don’t believe that robots can replace human journalists. Let journalists do what they are good at, and let the machines do what they are good at.” Because Gibbs believes that journalism is creative, writing news reports requires critical thinking and subjective and objective judgment. That’s why robots are needed to help people do some mechanized work so that human reporters have more time and energy to do more challenging things (Peiser 2019). This view of Gibbs is the same as that of Zhou Jie. They believe that human reporter should devote themselves to more advanced work.
On the contrary, according to an article written by Miroshnichenko, he thinks that robots will replace journalists. He believes that the newsroom must produce as much content as possible to increase fan reading, views, click-through rates, and more. Instead of letting reporters spend a long time to write good news to attract thousands of readers, it’s better to let the robot write the thousand news stories in the same period to attract readers, even if there are only one hundred readers per article (Andrey, pp. 17-18, 2018). Miroshnichenko believes that the quantity of news is more important than the quality of the story. So he thinks robots will replace journalists.
Marc Zionts, the chief executive of Automated Insights, said that “There is still a long way to go before machines replace human beings editors who have creative thoughts and flesh-and-blood (Peiser 2019).”
Reference：
- Andrey, M. (2018) ‘AI to Bypass Creativity. Will Robots Replace Journalists? (The Answer Is “Yes”)’, Information, Vol 9, Iss 7, p. 18
- ‘Artificial Intelligence can check the spread of fake news but can never replace human journalists’ (2018) Australasian Policing, Vol. 10, No. 2, p. 53
- Peiser J 2019 ,”The Rise Of the Robot Reporter”, The New York Times, 5 February, accessed 4 June 2019, < https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/05/business/media/artificial-intelligence-journalism-robots.html?searchResultPosition=4>
王曉萱 Felicia Wang 