Associated Press expands sports coverage with stories written by machines

The rise of the machines continues this week with news that the Associated Press (AP) is expanding its baseball coverage through automated stories generated by algorithms. The New York-based nonprofit news agency has ramped up its partnership with Automated Insights, a Durham, Carolina-based company that uses artificial intelligence to analyze and transform big data into stories. The AP has worked with Automated Insights for a number of years already, with more than 3,000 computer-generated corporate earnings reports created over the past couple of years based on data supplied by Zacks Investment Research, and it has used automation in sports reports too. The AP also participated in a 5.5 million funding round into Automated Insights back in 2014. Automated Insights offers its Wordsmith A.I. platform to a number of big-name media companies, including Yahoo, and to the casual observer it may be difficult to know that a report wasn't written by a human.