A game about a robot becoming a journalist feels a bit on the nose right now, in the midst of stories about writers being replaced by AI. But Ben Gelinas, director of Times & Galaxy, says it was never his intention to make a point about the rise of artificial intelligence. The intention was to focus on journalism itself. "You can't write for everybody, and I'm trying to show that." You play as Reporterbot, the first ever robot reporter for the Times & Galaxy, a space "holopaper" that's produced aboard a starship.

Continuous improvements in modern natural language generation in recent years have enabled bots that can perform automatic news reporting. This has practical applications for example in minor league sports, where result data is available but it is not always cost-efficient to send human reporters to the contests. Most existing robot reporters however focus exclusively on text generation. Xiaomingbot contains four components: a news generator, a news translator, a cross-lingual newsreader and an animated avatar. Its input is data table containing game and event records, and the output is an animated avatar reading a news article with a synthesized voice.

"The financial markets are ahead of others in this," said John Micklethwait, the editor in chief of Bloomberg. In addition to covering company earnings for Bloomberg, robot reporters have been prolific producers of articles on minor league baseball for The Associated Press, high school football for The Washington Post and earthquakes for The Los Angeles Times. MANCHESTER, N.H. (AP) -- Jonathan Davis hit for the cycle, as the New Hampshire Fisher Cats topped the Portland Sea Dogs 10-3 on Tuesday. Last week, The Guardian's Australia edition published its first machine-assisted article, an account of annual political donations to the country's political parties. And Forbes recently announced that it was testing a tool called Bertie to provide reporters with rough drafts and story templates.

"The financial markets are ahead of others in this," said John Micklethwait, the editor in chief of Bloomberg. In addition to covering company earnings for Bloomberg, robot reporters have been prolific producers of articles on minor league baseball for The Associated Press, high school football for The Washington Post and earthquakes for The Los Angeles Times. MANCHESTER, N.H. (AP) -- Jonathan Davis hit for the cycle, as the New Hampshire Fisher Cats topped the Portland Sea Dogs 10-3 on Tuesday. Last week, The Guardian's Australia edition published its first machine-assisted article, an account of annual political donations to the country's political parties. And Forbes recently announced that it was testing a tool called Birdie to provide reporters with rough drafts and story templates.

It's been a year since The Washington Post started using its homegrown artificial intelligence technology, Heliograf, to spit out around 300 short reports and alerts on the Rio Olympics. Since then, it's used Heliograf to cover congressional and gubernatorial races on Election Day and D.C.-area high school football games, producing stories like this one and tweets like this: Landon beat Whitman 34-0; https://t.co/V6zVPi7a9O The Associated Press has used robots to automate earnings coverage, while USA Today has used video software to create short videos. But media executives are more excited about AI's potential to go beyond rote reporting. Jeremy Gilbert, director of strategic initiatives at the Post, shared what the paper has learned so far from robo reporting and what it's still trying to figure out.

If a recent interaction between a human journalist and his Chinese robot counterpart is anything to go by, it'll be a while before a journalist job will be lost to (a robot in) China. On Monday (April 24), Jia Jia, a Chinese-manufactured robot under development for about three years (link in Chinese), had a conversation with AI expert Kevin Kelly, the co-founder of technology magazine Wired. State-run Xinhua news agency broadcast the chat live, billing Jia Jia as a special reporter. Jia Jia looks like a young woman in her early twenties, blinks and smiles in a fairly human way, moves her lips when she speaks, and has micro-expressions. But she had a hard time responding naturally to many of the questions posed by Kelly, sometimes taking up to 10 seconds to answer.

A Chinese robot reporter produced 450 Olympic news items over the 15-day sporting event, mostly about China's dominant sports, like badminton and table tennis. While its prose was criticized for being somewhat rote, the coverage certainly was speedy, appearing minutes after events ended. The "AI writing robot" Xiaomingbot (link in Chinese) produced 30 to 40 pieces most days of the Olympics, and on August 14 it published 58 (link in Chinese), according to co-inventor Toutiao news. Toutiao, or "headline news" is a search engine and news syndication service with a website, app, and public WeChat account that boasted 530 million total users in August. Most of the robot news items were 100 words or so. The most-read was a piece on a Badminton Women's Singles game won by London Olympics sliver medalist Wang Yihan.