Robots Writing The News: Why Not?

The Guardian is running a story about how Microsoft has laid off 27 journalists tasked with writing MSN News, outsourced to PA Media, and replaced them with a series of machine learning algorithms. Journalism doesn't seem like a profession that's about to undergo automation. But MSN News, like many other news portals, is pretty much a rehash of agency stories or licensed items from other media written in a neutral way, avoiding any kind of editorial line, since doing so would mean losing a part of the potential audience. The job consists of providing a panorama of what's making the news, and from there, summarizing, extracting, and writing in a particularly dispassionate manner. MSN News is simply a news aggregator.