A four-year-old London startup called Echobox found traction in Europe and is poised to further expand in the U.S. with its AI-assisted social media product. Echobox, which has about 30 employees and raised $3.4 million in seed funding last year, aims to develop "AI for automating repetitive tasks" for publishers, according to CEO and founder Antoine Amann. The first product the company has brought to market is an automated social media tool that uses a publisher's internal audience analytics along with machine learning to completely run social media accounts. Le Monde in France and The Guardian in the U.K. are clients. A challenge with publishing analytics today is how to make sense of them, and Echobox isn't alone in trying to solve this.

The following piece is a guest post from Jessica Rovello, the CEO and co-founder of Arkadium, which provides interactive content to brands and publishers. Guest posts do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this publication. Is the growing adoption of Artificial intelligence (AI) products by digital publishers a much-needed lifeline for a struggling industry, or the next deadly threat to its survival? Some worry that AI will eventually "take over" journalism, replacing skilled humans with soulless, data-scraping machines. But these three industry leaders are showing how innovative implementation of AI can free newsroom resources to focus on the vital journalistic tasks--like reporting and editing--that humans do best.

The following piece is a guest post from Jessica Rovello, the CEO and co-founder of Arkadium, which provides interactive content to brands and publishers. Guest posts do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this publication. Is the growing adoption of Artificial intelligence (AI) products by digital publishers a much-needed ...

Long before Nov. 8, 2016, research scientist Dean Pomerleau was concerned about fake news. His Facebook News Feed had been filled with political disinformation during the presidential campaign, and he saw that the stories appeared to be influencing reader's attitudes toward the candidates. Though skeptical, he wondered whether it were possible to create a machine learning tool that could flag fake news stories, and discussed the idea with colleagues on Twitter. Then he issued a challenge: he bet that it were not possible to do, and asked his colleagues could prove him wrong. Delip Rao, the founder of Joostware, which builds Artificial Intelligence products, contacted Pomerleau and offered his help – and thus began the Fake News Challenge.

"Boyfriend Maker," an app that allowed users to create and chat with a virtual "boyfriend" was at the top of the App store in Asian markets and was rated #1 in Japan, the Daily Dot had reported. The app used Artificial Intelligence that allowed it to learn language from its users. Within months, it was pulled from the app store when its chat responses became racist, sexist and sometimes even violent. "It was horrible," according to Hilary Mason, the CEO and founder of Fast Forward Labs. She spoke about the app at a media and tech conference recently to illustrate the point that much of the work humans have done around machine learning and artificial intelligence has been done outside the mainstream tech community.

The rise of artificial intelligence and automation in journalism has been front and center in the news lately, from Narrative Science co-founder Kris Hammond's prediction that "a machine will win a Pulitzer one day" to Facebook's decision to automate its Trending Topics feed. Algorithms seem certain to play a growing role in the production and curation of news, but it remains unclear what exactly this trend will mean for journalism -- or for the human journalists who currently produce it. Celebrants argue that algorithms will simply take over journalism's most menial tasks, freeing up human journalists to tackle more advanced work. Bloomberg editor-in-chief John Micklethwait, for example, called automation "crucial to the future of journalism," and New York magazine writer Kevin Roose described the introduction of automated reporting as "the best thing to happen to journalists in a long time." However, skeptics fear that robots may end up replacing journalists instead of helping them.