Journalists Replaced By Robots
from the who-needs-me-anyway dept
The Register is reporting about a new robot that has been designed to take press releases and wire releases and automatically write short news articles based on them. This isn’t really what it’s designed for, but the Register likes the idea. Hell, if it could come up with funny lines and the occasional insightful comment (along with some terrible grammar and spelling), then we could just let it write Techdirt (because, while we’re perfect spellers and grammarians, we’ve never been either funny or insightful).
Comments on “Journalists Replaced By Robots”
please do not replace me.
mhh5 will adapt. need more input.
Harumph
If any news source admits to using something like this, that will be the last time I pay attention to them. It’s bad enough that a lot of online so-called news consists of verbatim press releases. To take that a step further and mechanically rearrange the words to make something look original when it’s not is not a good idea. It will lead the same mistakes that all the news networks made last November when they called the election based on suspicious data from a single source.
It will get abused, too. If my job were writing press releases, I’d get a copy of this software and tweak my words so that the software re-write looked as favorable as possible.
I think simple PR relays may lose importance
I work for a company that manages press releases online for large companies (or rather produces software that allows them to do it themselves easily) and one thing I would like to put in is a digital signature so that journalists can be sure it hasn’t been rewritten!
Phillip.