Automation in manufacturing is nothing new. Industries must
adopt automation to cut costs and stay competitive. If robots can do your job
better than you do, then you’re out of luck.

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Sadly, the news industry is not exempted from automation. Automated
journalism is a thing now. Instead of journalists, computer programs write all
the news articles.

Is It OK for Robots to Write the
News?

Using computer programs to extract and summarize content is
an old practice. Get-rich-quick schemers often used scripts to create scrapper sites. All the content for
such sites was stolen from other websites within the same niche. Sometimes the
scripts spun the content by replacing certain words with their synonyms so the articles
on the website were never exactly the same with the originals.

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You can think of current automated journalism as something
similar to scrapping. Engineers plug some intelligence into a scrapper program
to create a news aggregator site where each news piece is purely
machine-generated. All the generated articles read like “normal” news too.

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“Is letting AI write
the news beneficial?”

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Not for the journalist who lost their jobs, of course. The
benefits fall onto the lap of the news aggregator company. Firstly, employing AI
is a lot cheaper than hiring tens of journalists and editors. No need to pay
for benefits or anything.

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AI also works faster than people do. With events popping up
and changing so rapidly these days, having AI scrape, sort, and rehash news
pieces will be so much quicker than letting humans do it. In addition to a more
frequent publishing schedule, the articles will also have fewer typos and grammar mistakes.

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The next benefit is computer programs are easier to improve.
Add analytics data as feedback for
the AI, and it will start learning what kind of stories drives the most traffic
and generate the most ad revenue. When the AI programs kick the revenues up
along with the profits, you can be sure every news portal owner will unleash their
own army of robots to create tons of money-grabbing stories.

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“So, should we let AI take care of the news now?”

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Frankly, it’s not up to us, the readers. It’s a business
decision that media companies will need to make. And if the money is good, they
will certainly let robots do all the work.

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“But letting AI write ALL the news sounds like a bad idea..”

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It does, doesn’t it? Thankfully, as the readers, we can make
the choice to read or not to read the robot’s work. Judging from the pace AI
technology is moving right now, it won’t be long before we need to make such a
choice every time we want to read the news.