This is a true story.
The AP announced last month that it would use Automated Insights’ software, called Wordsmith, to produce up to 4,440 robot-written corporate-earnings reports per quarter, more than ten times the number its human reporters currently produce.
Here’s a sample of a story generated automatically:
Alcoa Inc. (AA) on Tuesday reported a second-quarter profit of $138 million, reversing a year-ago loss, and the results beat analysts’ expectation. The company reported strong results in its engineered-products business, which makes parts for industrial customers, while looking to cut costs in its aluminum-smelting segment.
This is just an example of what’s coming. As intelligence modeling becomes steadily more sophisticated, the ability to automatically generate news stories will become mainstream. To me, the key to a life lived happily alongside our robotic comrades is control. As long as we purposely concede day-to-day burdensome tasks to artificial intelligences, no worries.
The problem begins when the dynamic shifts and we impoverish ourselves purely for a more efficient bottom line. The decision of which tasks to automate are never made based on human need. Those decisions are always made in an effort to reduce costs. And that’s the snake that might bite us in the ass.
Discuss.
I have a feeling the future is going to either turn out really good or really bad. Not sure which – too complicated to predict.
That’s a rather pessimistic view.
This is the pattern I have noticed.
Automation reduces costs and eliminates jobs.
The corporations that pioneer the automation increase profits.
Their competitors adopt the automation and start passing savings to attract more customers.
The people that were fired must work hard to transition to new types of jobs while under the pressure and stigma of unemployment. Most of their neighbours blame the evil greedy corporations and in the next breath they revolt against the lazy entitled welfare recipients.
The automation often lowers the quality of the product and/or service, but the lower price point allows access to a (sometimes hugely) larger mass market.
A premium option that preserves and continues to enhance the previously available quality emerges to serve the high end.
Fewer people employed means fewer potential customers for your now-premium product.
It will always be used for the bottom line in an capitalist technology run society. Foxconn is already using robots to make iPhones. Eventually the whole process will be automated.
Funny that a comment on the use of robots in journalism should end with the robot-like command “Discuss”.
Eh, historically speaking it’s more likely we’ll end up in the middle, making constant small-scale improvements in a subtle and relatively innocuous fashion that dulls us to the fact that we’ve advanced rather staggeringly over just a few generations, and punctuated by big, world-changing technological leaps every now and then, like electricity or the Internet. And for the most part the standards of living of most people will continue inexorably upwards as we take increasing control of the body, disease, metropolis etc.
I don’t think this is a commentary on robots or the future at all — I think it is a commentary on the sad, sorry state of modern journalism. If your writing is so robotic and empty that a robot writer can replace you, then you were already failing at your job. Glenn Greenwald or Matt Taibi are not going to be replaced by a robot writer any time soon.
But those guys are stars, right? What is the everyday hack writer journalist supposed to do? They are supposed to write like Leigh Cowart, for example, who wrote this excellent article about the popular reaction to the cover of ESPN’s recent Body issue, featuring Prince Fielder, which is possibly NSFW if you live somewhere that is all prudy:
Prince Fielder’s Naked ESPN Cover Is Sexy As Hell (by Leigh Cowart)
http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/prince-fielders-naked-espn-cover-is-sexy-as-hell-1603146649
That is really great modern journalism writing, that speaks directly to the reader with an intimacy and honesty that is appropriate for reading on an iPad or other modern journalism-reading device. That doesn’t read like robot puke.
So as usual, the journalism-meets-technology articles are actually about the utter failure of most journalists to get beyond the pablum they were served in journalism school, which is a place where potentially great writers go to be lobotomized. Technology is just making it harder to be a really, really bad journalist. But at the same time, technology also enables a really, really bad journalist to become a better journalist with a little effort. There has never been so much free learning available to every journalist. There has never been so much great writing at the fingertips of a writing student.
In short: you have to write better than a robot. Duh.
Either that or earnings reports are just super bland, follow a well-established template, and include so much BS that they can easily be parsed and reduced to a couple sentences without losing any meaning at all.