Robots Are Writing the News and Nobody's Talking About It

As journalists face increased layoffs despite the growing appetite for up-to-the-minute, timely news, a new trend has quietly been disrupting the news industry. News organizations are increasingly turning toward artificial intelligence (AI) for production, using a variety of new automated systems to pump out content with minimal need for direct human input. According to a report by The New York Times, Bloomberg News relies on a system called Cyborg to produce about a third of its articles. Most of Cyborg's output takes the form of company earnings reports that are rife with percentages, charts, and other financial data that can be crunched down into a news story quickly and accurately. Increasingly, major news agency like Reuters and Associated Press, along with a number of newspapers such as Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, are using algorithms to crunch out news on everything from local minor league sports games to earthquakes.