Increasing Presence of Robots in Journalism and News Writing

Major global news agencies like Reuters and the Associated Press are sources for many of the news we see and read daily. Reports indicate that these agencies are increasingly delegating news writing and reporting tasks to artificial intelligence, or 'robots.' For example, the American publication Forbes reports that the Associated Press has now entrusted the writing of thousands of its sports reports to AI. According to this publication, besides the Associated Press, Reuters, Yahoo Sports, and newspapers like The New York Times and The Washington Post are all utilizing AI for content production. Another example is the British news agency 'Press Association,' which can now produce 30,000 of its local news reports using AI. Two years ago, The Washington Post reported that it had written and published about 850 articles in one year using a dedicated AI program called 'Heliograf.' These articles included 500 pieces on the U.S. elections, which received over 500,000 clicks. AI accomplishes this through a process called 'natural language generation,' where raw data is fed into a 'robot' or computer, which first determines what narrative format to choose for the data. AI has a variety of pre-designed narrative formats (literary, news, sports, scientific, etc.) and organizes the received data into the desired format, thus creating a news narrative. These narratives are also vetted by a program that checks their logical coherence to give the text a 'human-like' speech form. Furthermore, newsrooms in various media now use various 'automated journalism' applications that have significantly sped up the processes of verifying received news, eliminating fake news, summarizing texts, and monitoring audience comments. The delegation of writing tasks to AI does not stop here; for instance, the German bank Commerzbank currently performs 75% of its research report writing on customer assets and stocks using AI. Many financial institutions are now preparing and printing 10 to 15-page financial reports within seconds using a program called Quill. The use of AI for news writing began in 2012 and has become more common today, leading to an increase in articles expressing concern about the future job prospects of journalists. On the other hand, some believe that by delegating tedious and routine reporting tasks to robots, journalists can focus on investigative work and provide better explanatory and analytical articles.