These days almost every journalism conference has at least one session on the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in modern journalism and, interesting, it is always been asked: “will AI replace journalists and writers?”. Last week I had an opportunity to visit the technology center of America’s top news agency in Washington. There were using many tools and techniques to generate quick, accurate and foolproof contents using Artificial Intelligence (AI). These tools had multiple layers of data-centric AI wrappers to ensure the filtration of Fake News. During my visit, I was able to produce 550 words article, based on a press release, with a single click and amazingly this article had many relevant references from the past. It was hard to say that it was a machine written article.
As print media around the world is struggling with its presence, war on digital media to produce new, verified and quality content is getting into a new era, an era of AI. The BBC Juicer, News Tracer of Reuters, Lab-Editor of New York Times, Knowledge-Map of Washington post and Quill platform of Narrative Science, they all are using top-notch AI-enabled tools to generate best contents without any human involvement.
While AI algorithms are complex, setting up patterns of data for future use is key for this process. In 2015, The New York Times implemented its experimental AI project known as Editor and objective was to help journalists in writing news and articles. The journalists were required to use tags to highlight the phrase, headline, or main points of the text. Over time, the computer learns to recognize these semantic tags and learn the most salient parts of an article. By searching through data in real-time and extracting information based on requested categories, such as events, people, location and dates, “Editor” can make information more accessible, simplifying the research process and providing fast and accurate fact-checking.
As print media around the world is struggling with its presence, war on digital media to produce new, verified and quality content is getting into a new era, an era of AI
Breaking a news, leading on a top trending story and dominating social media is all about maintaining the top ranking. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), a UK based news agency, is using “The Juicer”, an AI-enabled tool to extract more than 1000 global news outlets’ RSS feeds and aggregates and extracts news articles from the BBC and outside sources. It then assigns semantic tags to the stories and organizes them to one of four categories: organizations, locations, people, and things. So, if a journalist is looking for the latest stories on President Trump’s chances to win in 2020 elections or articles associated with Democrat Presidential Debate, Juicer quickly searches the web and provides a list of related content.
Enabling data visualization in real-time is another milestone achieved by Reuters using artificial intelligence (AI). In 2016, Reuters implemented an interactive data visualization platform across a spectrum of topics including entertainment, sports, and news. Now publishers can access the data via Reuters Open Media Express. Once embedded on the publishers’ website, the data visualizations are updated in real-time. By using this tool, the breadth of information can be as varied as “Apple Stock Prices” to “President Trump’s Popularity” to “Predictive Analytics for Marketing “, all at the click of a button.
Robot Journalism or automated journalism was always a dream of owners of media houses. The Washington Post implemented its AI-enabled platform called Robot Journalism using Heliograf smart software. During Rio Olympic Games, in 2016, the Post used Heliograf as a pilot project for coverage. Heliograf put together the news story by analyzing data about the games as it emerged. This information is then matched to relevant phrases in a story template and the machine adds the information to create a narrative that could be published across different platforms. The software can also alert journalists of any anomalies it finds in the data. This meant that during the Olympics, Heliograf was able to keep up with information relating to scores and medal counts in real-time, freeing up journalists so they could work on creating other content.
Sports news and updates are always prime contents for American and European media houses. I have seen people taking a newspaper from a news-stand, keeping only the sports section and throw the rest of the newspaper in the trash without even looking anything on the front page. For that reason, much of the initial media coverage about “robot journalism” was involved in sports and finance stories at Yahoo!. Despite the company’s decade-long decline Yahoo! still boasts a massive following on its news, finance, and sports media properties. Using Automated Insight, a natural language generation AI tool, Yahoo! claims that by generating content (articles, reports, emails) with data from specific sports teams (or fantasy sports teams) it is able to kill two birds with one stone: First, the company draws in readers for longer sessions with customized, rich content (based on sports data). Second, advertisers eagerly look for engaging material and are willing to spend more on ads that will gain more exposure for more time with more users.
Competing competitors over Facebook, Tweeter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn is always challenging because leading media houses want to make sure they don’t promote Fake News. The Associated Press (AP) started using AI-enabled platform NewsWhip to keep itself ahead of trending news stories on social media. NewsWhip uses analytics to perform competitor benchmarking on social media, keywords and related verticals, and current influencers across all social media network platforms. The AP is also using an Automated Insight’s product “Wordsmith” product to turn raw earnings data into articles – which is similar to the use case with Yahoo!.
Many organizations are also promoting and financing AI lead initiatives in media houses. For example, in 2016, Quartz received a $250,000 grant from the Knight Foundation to set up a Bot Studio to create a set of automated tools for journalists. The move is inspired by the fact that today’s news media has moved not just from print to desktop to mobile phones, but also to other internet-connected devices for the home and car.
Every media house is unique when it comes to attracting targeted audiences. In 2016, The Guardian implemented an AI solution using Facebook’s product which allows users to pick from US, UK and Australian versions of Guardian News, choose from a 6 am, 7 am or 8 am delivery time and it will deliver selected news stories every day via Facebook Messenger.
In my opinion, there is a lot of room of AI in journalism specially the newsroom as it saves time, money and increase speed with accuracy, but I don’t think journalists and writers are replaceable with present AI developments. As we are already seen job cuts in this industry, large publication or newsroom will be “augmented” with additional capabilities to gather and manage data. In next 10 years, I do envision reporters and machines will be working together in newsroom to help human journalists keep up with the ever-expanding scale of global news media.
The writer is a technology expert who is working with US government based in Washington DC