Artificial intelligence and journalism

Readers of 20 regional newspapers in the UK have been unwittingly involved in what was called a first for journalism. At the end of 2017, a bunch of stories published in these dailies and weeklies were written by algorithms, rather than humans. The stories reported on trends in birth registrations across the UK drawn from data from the Office of National Statistics, such as how many children were registered by married, cohabiting or single parents. But each individual story gave the figures a local twist. The trial was part of a project by Press Association, the UK's equivalent of The Canadian Press news service.