There are some jobs in the world in which a robot would be hardpressed to replace a human at. However it seems that writing is not one of them, and the UK Press Association will soon start to populate platforms with news articles that are written by robots. It also seems that Google has lent them a helping hand in making that a reality.The news agency has recently won a grant worth €706,000 from Google which will go towards helping create 30,000 news stories for use in local papers. Of course this hardly spells the end of journalism or writing as we know it. Speaking to The Guardian, the PA’s edition-in-chief, Peter Clifton said, “Skilled human journalists will still be vital in the process, but Radar allows us to harness artificial intelligence to scale up to a volume of local stories that would be impossible to provide manually. It is a fantastic step forward for PA.”
In fact it seems like this initiative will help local media outlets who might be struggling with their budgets, and having AI write and provide news could be a cheaper way of providing content. This is actually not the first time that AI has been used in newsrooms. The upside is clearly that AI will be faster compared to humans.
However we suppose one could argue that a robot writing might lack a certain “warmth” or “character” to an article, which is why sometimes certain articles written by particular journalists are preferred due to their style, analytical skills, and so on.
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