How May I Assist You?

Will robots replace journalists in the days to come?

- Anisha Gakhar

Journalism is a creative profession. It involves the seamless amalgamation of human elements such as emotion, judgement, tone and expression.

However, there is a trend that has caught up across verticals—writing algorithms/ templates have been widely employed across newsrooms and media houses, to produce articles and thereby replace human journalists. In 2016, Wordsmith, one of the news-writing algorithms, wrote and published 1.5 billion news stories. This number is comparable to or may even exceed work written and published by human journalists.

Automation, though, is based on formulae and a precise set of rules, hence, is mainly used for stories based on statistics and numerical figures; sports recaps, weather, financial reports, real estate analysis, and earnings reviews are some examples. Automated journalism helps take over routine tasks, so that manpower is left to focus on creative complex tasks. It also allows efficiency and cost-cutting, alleviating some financial burden that many news organisations face. However, automated journalism is also perceived as a threat to the authorship and quality of news and the uncertainty of employment within the industry.

Robotic journalism facilitates generation of news articles by computer programs. Through artificial intelligence (AI) software, stories are produced automatically by computers rather than human reporters. These programs interpret, organise, and present data in human-readable ways. Typically, the process involves an algorithm that scans large amounts of provided data, selects from an assortment of pre-programmed article structures, orders key points, and inserts details such as names, places, amounts, rankings, statistics, and other figures. The output can also be customised to fit a certain voice, tone, or style.