Market Updates

Artificial Intelligence in Journalism

May, 2019



Artificial Intelligence is influencing every sector in the current world and journalism is one among them. From automating monotonous tasks and streamlining media workflows, Artificial Intelligence is used for digging out more insights and to generate useful stories. AI is being used by some publications for writing articles. In April 2019, Springer Nature, an academic publishing company released its first research book. News agencies like Forbes uses “Bertie”, a ML based tool for content management.  “ReporterMate” became the first automated news reporting system when Guardian published the machine-assisted article in February 2019. Bloomberg News uses “Cyborg”, an ML based automated system to create articles on company earnings reports every quarter. Cyborg can find out the important facts and figures from a financial report and can make it a news story.

However, there are some disadvantages for this tech. OpenAI, a non-profit organization for AI founded by Elon Musk, demonstrated a software which can create fake news when a few bits of information is provided. Fake news is already a major issue in the internet world with governments and social media apps like Whatsapp trying to curb the spread of it. With the growth of AI support, it will become easier to generate fake news, which is the main reason OpenAI decided not to release the sophisticated versions of its software.

Conclusion

Recent advancements in machine learning has improved machine’s capacity to generate words. However, the output from a machine cannot be compared with a human writing since they cannot have high consistency and structure of human writers. This makes AI-generated fictional novels and poetry something which won’t be realized soon. Also, AI writing is not fool-proof and is prone to provide errors. However, this will get corrected with increased training from the editorial teams of publications.

- Arjun Das
ICT - Research Analyst
Infoholic Research