Here is a quick read: Meet ByteDance AI's Xiaomingbot: World's First Multilingual and Multimodal AI News Agent The paper Xiaomingbot: A Multilingual Robot News Reporter is on arXiv.

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.

What would our computers tell us if we gave them a voice? We'll soon find out thanks to Natural Language Generation which gives computers a written opinion on virtually anything. For now, we must program their responses, but soon they'll form their own opinions and develop a creative voice. This may seem a long way off, so let's consider their progression as a writer in comparison to a human. A child progresses as a writer by starting with basic creative writing exercises: What did you do over summer break?

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.

With dwindling budgets that require big layoffs, you really can't fault the news industry if it wants to catch a break. And to that end (although this is not so awesome for the news industry's writers), a lot of media outlets are kind of going full AI. Case in point, The Washington Post threw its hat in the AI game when setting it's AI, "Heliograf," to cover the Olympics, writing basic stories and keeping tallies of medal counts. Search engine and news syndication service Toutiao has employed Xiaomingbot, an AI writing robot, to cover the Olympics. Get this: the robot was able to publish 450 articles over the course of the 15-day event.

An "AI writing robot" produced up to 58 articles per day for a Chinese publication at the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro this month. The Xiaomingbot wrote reports for the news syndication service Toutiao, delivering news items within two minutes of events ending. During the two weeks of the Olympics, the robot reporter produced a total of 450 stories. Xiaomingbot is not the first artificial intelligence (AI) reporter, though the quantity of reports makes it arguably the most prolific. The articles--ranging from around 100 words to 821 articles--appear to have been well received by readers, though some comments seen by Quartz reportedly claimed the prose was "too robotic."