Artificial intelligence is remixing journalism into a “soup” of language

The rise of the robot reporter implies profound changes to the nature of the news.

Asensational scoop was tweeted last month by America’s National Public Radio: Elon Musk’s “massive space sex rocket” had exploded on launch. Alas, it turned out to be an automated mistranscription of SpaceX, the billionaire’s rocketry firm. The error may be a taste of what is to come as artificial intelligence (ai) plays a bigger role in newsrooms.

Machines have been helping deliver the news for years: the Associated Press (ap) began publishing automated company earnings reports in 2014. The New York Times uses machine learning to decide how many free articles to show readers before they hit a paywall. Bayerischer Rundfunk, a German public broadcaster, moderates online comments with ai help. ap now also deploys it to create video “shot lists”, describing who and what is in each clip.

As ai improves, it is taking on more creative roles. One is newsgathering. At Reuters, machines look for patterns in large data sets. ap uses ai for “event detection”, scanning social media for ripples of news. At a journalism conference last month in Perugia, Italy, Nick Diakopoulos of Northwestern University showed how Chatgpt, a hit ai chatbot, could be used to assess the newsworthiness of research papers. The judgments of his model and those of human editors had a correlation coefficient of 0.58—maybe a close enough match to help a busy newsroom with an initial sift.

Machines have been helping deliver the news for years: the Associated Press (ap) began publishing automated company earnings reports in 2014. The New York Times uses machine learning to decide how many free articles to show readers before they hit a paywall. Bayerischer Rundfunk, a German public broadcaster, moderates online comments with ai help. ap now also deploys it to create video “shot lists”, describing who and what is in each clip.

As ai improves, it is taking on more creative roles. One is newsgathering. At Reuters, machines look for patterns in large data sets. ap uses ai for “event detection”, scanning social media for ripples of news. At a journalism conference last month in Perugia, Italy, Nick Diakopoulos of Northwestern University showed how Chatgpt, a hit ai chatbot, could be used to assess the newsworthiness of research papers. The judgments of his model and those of human editors had a correlation coefficient of 0.58—maybe a close enough match to help a busy newsroom with an initial sift.