The Press Association becomes engaged UK-based news startup Urbs Media for the responsibility of building a suite of software that uses news data into savory content. Once up and running, the team is expecting the software will be ready to fill in some of the gaps that are currently existing under-serviced as the universal economic strain being experienced by newsrooms throughout the world deepens.
It’s related to a model The Associated Press has operated for a while now there in the States, mostly undertaking financial and cranny sports stories. A quick Google News search of the telltale tagline “This story was produced by Automated Insights” shows hits from news outlets across the U.S.
In a news statement heralding the business commitment, Press Association Editor-in-Chief Peter Clifton announced the move a “genuine game-changer,” emphasizing that the partnership will focus on novels that might not otherwise be written up as local newspapers last to die off in this massive fourth-estate extinction. Of course, he was also quick to add that the move won’t do away with the human talent entirely.
“Skilled human journalists will still be important in the process,” he emphasized, “but Radar allows us to fit artificial intelligence to scale up to an amount of local stories that would be impossible to provide manually.” People will stay involved in the curation and editing of the stories and, probably, help limit the possibility of accidentally issuing incorrect information in an era when “fake news” is a fairly barbed insult on all sides of the political spectrum.
Will robotic journalists replace or simply support the effort of their human counterparts? A little bit of both, probably. Human news reporters regularly point out that AIs tend to lack refinement and a flare for writing in the stories they beat out.
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