Written out of the story: the robots capable of making the news

In January 2016, Fan Hui, three-time champion of the east Asian board game Go, lost to a computer program developed by Google's subsidiary DeepMind. The game is far more difficult to master than chess, so it was a historic victory for artificial intelligence (AI) which has seen huge advances in recent years. But could AI one day perform more creative tasks? A small tech firm in the US is proving that even journalists aren't safe from the robot revolution with a product that automates the writing process. Wordsmith – an artificial writer developed by the North Carolina-based company Automated Insights – cherrypicks elements from a dataset and uses them to structure a "human sounding" article. As well as being able to use more emotive language, it varies diction and syntax to make its work more readable.