Media
News Automation – The rewards, risks and realities of 'machine journalism' - WAN-IFRA
This report focuses on a specific part of news automation: the automated generation of news texts based on structured data. This is not about crystal ball gazing. News automation is already making itself felt in the daily life of newsrooms, and the examples presented in this report show how automation can aid journalism as well as the implications, and the ethics involved. Media outlets face ever-growing commercial pressure to extract higher margins from dwindling resources and that is a key driver for news automation. Right now, one of the main goals of automated content is to save journalistic effort, especially on repetitive tasks, while increasing output volume.
Newsmakers Columbia University Press
Will the use of artificial intelligence (AI), algorithms, and smart machines be the end of journalism as we know it--or its savior? In Newsmakers, Francesco Marconi, who has led the development of the Associated Press and Wall Street Journal's use of AI in journalism, offers a new perspective on the potential of these technologies. He explains how reporters, editors, and newsrooms of all sizes can take advantage of the possibilities they provide to develop new ways of telling stories and connecting with readers. Marconi analyzes the challenges and opportunities of AI through case studies ranging from financial publications using algorithms to write earnings reports to investigative reporters analyzing large data sets to outlets determining the distribution of news on social media. Newsmakers contends that AI can augment--not automate--the industry, allowing journalists to break more news more quickly while simultaneously freeing up their time for deeper analysis.
Automating the News -- Nicholas Diakopoulos
From hidden connections in big data to bots spreading fake news, journalism is increasingly computer-generated. An expert in computer science and media explains the present and future of a world in which news is created by algorithm. Amid the push for self-driving cars and the roboticization of industrial economies, automation has proven one of the biggest news stories of our time. Yet the wide-scale automation of the news itself has largely escaped attention. In this lively exposé of that rapidly shifting terrain, Nicholas Diakopoulos focuses on the people who tell the stories--increasingly with the help of computer algorithms that are fundamentally changing the creation, dissemination, and reception of the news. Diakopoulos reveals how machine learning and data mining have transformed investigative journalism.
A.I. use is still rising globally, but most firms' tech isn't yet close to 'real' intelligence
Businesses are expected to spend as much as $97.9 billion annually on AI projects by 2023, up from just $37.5 billion this year, IDC forecasts. But there's still some debate about what qualifies as true AI. When China's state-run Xinhua News Agency last year announced that it had created the "world's first" AI news anchor, some in the industry balked. The digital anchor was built to move and speak as a normal anchor would, but its underlying technology leaned closer to machine learning than true artificial intelligence. Perhaps the simplest definition of what constitutes AI came from one of the founders of the discipline, Stanford University Professor John McCarthy, who died in 2011.
How to create a machine learning dataset from scratch?
My grandmother was an outstanding cook. So when I recently came across her old cook book I tried to read through some of the recipes, hoping I could recreate some of the dishes I enjoyed as a kid. However this turned out harder than expected since the book was printed around 1911 in a typeface called fraktur. For example the letter "A" looks like a "U" in fraktur and every time I see a "Z" in fraktur I read a "3" (see Figure 2). So the idea emerged to develop a pipeline that will create a live translation of the fraktur letters into a modern typeface.