Are machines taking over newsrooms? Not so soon
But bots are helping journalists track down news and propagate it in the most optimum manner possible
In Roald Dahl’s 1953 short story The Great
Automatic Grammatizator, a man surmises that a set of mathematical principles
can be used to establish the rules of grammar. He ends up creating an enormous
machine that can write a prize-winning novel in a quarter of an hour. The story
ends on a dystopian note with the world’s writers being coerced into licensing
their creativity to the machine.
Sixty four years later, when The Economist
decided to train its artificial intelligence (AI) programme on articles from
its science and technology section, it wasn’t exactly attempting to invoke
Dahl’s Grammatizator. It was just testing the waters for the wave of automated
journalism that is sweeping newsrooms across the world.
The results were not entirely unexpected. The
robot reporter managed to clone The Economist’s style and the topics they cover
frequently. But even as the sentences were grammatically correct, they were
incoherent. When it comes to gathering information about a subject, machines
have a natural edge over humans: What techies describe as tasks that involve
pattern recognition machine learning.
But they haven’t quite caught up with flesh
and blood journalists when it comes to gleaning facts on the ground and getting
the texture and context of the story. Where bots are indeed catching up fast –
through a network of high-fangled sensors, social media feeds and advanced
cameras – is in tracking down breaking news and helping journalists interpret
and propagate it in the most efficient and optimum way possible. So, say a
person tweets about a subway blast in a European city and the robot puts
together the most relevant updates for the reporters and editors in no time,
the machine is amplifying the message through technology and thereby acting
like an aid to the journalist. Therefore, instead of replacing journalists,
bots are actually augmenting the journalistic process. The Washington Post’s
Heliograf bot which uses AI in a highly sophisticated fashion to churn out
automated news reports, BBC News Labs’ news extraction tool called Juicer and
Thomson Reuters’ software for machine-written articles come to mind. The New
York Times uses bots to moderate user comments on its website.
One sphere where machines cannot hope to
match up to human journalists for at least a few years – and thank god for that
– is in thought pieces and opinion articles. They still have no answer to the
power of imagination. The Great Automatic Grammatizator cannot be a match for a
Dahl, the human brain that thought of it in the first place. The machines may
be coming, but they are not quite here, yet.
Source | Hindustan Times | 1st January
2018
Regards
Pralhad
Jadhav
Senior Manager @
Knowledge Repository
Khaitan &
Co
Twitter Handle | @Pralhad161978
