The scary question is robots want to be jou Will the depressing tones of Marvin the Paranoid Android take over the newsrooms of the future, wonders Laura Slattery
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an robots replace journalists? If a robot was writing this, it might answer ‘negative, master’ and move on. And yet robots – or programs endowed with artificial intelligence, to be less earthling about it – are already capable of generating sports and financial reports, albeit ones that make even highly formulaic flesh-and-blood offerings look like daringly experimental, idiosyncratic literature. Should journalists be worried by the idea that a robot revolution could render human-performed tasks obsolete? That editors might get the bright idea that newsroom staffed by machines would be easier to control? Or is this just another case of getting computers to do the heavy lifting while allowing journalists to make better use of their time and skills? To date, the most high-profile uprising has come courtesy of Narrative Science, a Chicago-based technology company that makes ‘rich narrative content’ from ‘structured data sources’ and does so ‘at a scale that is simply unreachable given human resources alone’. Although it first tested its programs on college baseball game summaries, the company is now better known for the corporate earnings previews published by Forbes.com. These previews are churned out by Narrative Science at a volume that would require considerable staff power. A human needs only to read two or three reports to detect the pattern of data and limits of their vocabulary. The expectations of ‘analysts’ or Wall Street’ form the first paragraph. The middle section gives the financial back history, explaining quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year comparisons, while the preview concludes with analysts’ buy, sell or hold recommendations. To human eyes, there is something missing in these previews – it is storytelling stripped so bare it misses the story. A recent preview of AOL’s results, for example, noted the losses of a year earlier, concluding that ‘analysts have 16 | theJournalist
grown increasingly optimistic about the stock in the last three months’. So far, so accurate. But it took a human at Bloomberg to explain the ‘why’ of AOL’s improved performance – since being spun out from Time Warner, AOL has made strides in its plan to transform itself into an advertising-based publishing business that gleans revenues from the likes of Huffington Post and TechCrunch. These previews are open to comments, but do not appear to attract any – after all, who would you be talking to? Why respond to a machine, unless you are one too? Indeed, as the reports’ likely readers are members of the equity investment community, which is itself fond of exploiting automation to make money, their end-users are arguably other computers, not the carbon-based lifeforms that consume the generalist press. Still, where there is a data-derived news formula – up or down, buy or sell, win or lose – there lurks the potential for automation, even if the robot-produced content is merely a starting template that then needs to be finessed by a human brain. Olivia Solon, associate editor of Wired.co.uk, phrased it bluntly while discussing this subject at a media conference in Dublin recently: “Most of the articles that we let robots take over are fairly dreary for journalists.” Solon cited the possibilities for entire genres of reportage posed by technology such as Face.com’s Klik app – a thirdparty app that automatically identifies and tags photos of your Facebook friends. Imagine the joys of combining realtime facial recognition with the technological Holy Grail for print journalists: reliable dictaphone transcription software. After Solon’s talk, a group of news editors from my newspaper jokingly teased out one future application: the selfgeneration of ‘for the record’-style accounts of parliamentary sessions. With the right technology, a political he-said-shesaid could be created instantly for readers’ clicking pleasure – assuming readers and competitors don’t have the technology too, of course. In journalism, as in other professional fields, it’s the dirty work that we want to delegate – the glamour-lite information processing that can often represent a commercially important segment of journalism, but is never going to win anyone a Pulitzer. Solon was sceptical, however, about the ability of artificial intelligence to crack a joke. “I’m not sure a robot would be able to come up with headlines for the Sun,”she said, citing as her tabloid favourite that paper’s 1998 “Zip me up before you