Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Scribes everywhere, look alive: Google is now funding a project which will use AI to write automated news stories,

The Press Association, a UK news agency, received about $807,000 from the third round of Google’s Digital News Initiative funding. Their project? Reporters and Data and Robots, or RADAR, an AI/human collaborative news site which will produce “a daily diet of compelling stories.”

RADAR is listed on the DNI site as a “large” project, with a goal towards providing a steady stream of ready-made content for smaller news sites....

Amanda Stent, a natural language processing researcher at Bloomberg, said data scientists want to work with journalists to create mutually-beneficial solutions. “I see the newsroom working with data science to create very forward looking, fast and accurate journalism, both text and multimedia,” she said. “I think it’s incredibly exciting and really helps people who are consumers of media to make better decisions and be better informed.”

John Borthwick, the CEO of Betaworks, said that humans need to begin to discuss the ethical implications of machine learning and to understand how machines interact with human experiences. “Our sense as human beings that we have this ability to be able to do things that machines can’t do is going to be challenged, and we need to start thinking about this,” he said.

Borthwick pointed to the fact that political bots had a significant impact on how Americans thought about the 2016 presidential candidates and how they voted.