Immediately following a destructive earthquake in China’s Sichuan Province last week, a robot writer automatically generated a 540-character news story with useful information about the earthquake and four photographs. The entire process took only 25 seconds, a perfect example of how fast and powerful artificial intelligence (AI) can be.
Considering how timeliness is critical in journalism and the reading habits of Internet users — who typically decide whether to read an article by scanning its title and summary — computer-generated news stories can be just as effective as those written by professional reporters — and definitely much cheaper.
Does this mean reporters will be replaced? It is worth investigating how Internet users interpret computer-generated news content. With the rise of social media, the definition of news has changed. Nowadays, news stories with photographs or videos typically attract more readers than text-only stories.
In the hope of increasing their views through social media sharing and discussion, news stories have become more diverse. Often the main content of a news story is just a compilation of cute, outrageous or horrifying video clips.
As news becomes more visually oriented, the ways in which stories are produced have also changed. AI writers were invented to automatically generate large volumes of stories about crime, health and disasters using templates created for each category and databases of online reader preferences.
Although computer-generated news stories still require humans collaborating with the AI writers, the key elements that make such stories possible are technologies, information and standardized procedures. The way computer algorithms have significantly changed the nature of news should not be overlooked.
Computer-generated stories tend to rely on statistics, as they are created by automatically analyzing large amounts of raw data. They can cover a variety of subjects from earthquakes to stock markets and election results, and can even imitate the style and tone of human reporters by employing commonly used words and phrases.
AI writers will only become faster and more common. For Internet users accessing a large amount of information, such news stories might be informative, but lacking in depth.
AI writers must be supported by databases and algorithms, but how are the databases and algorithms designed? The best samples for robots to model their writing on always come from experienced human reporters and editors, whose emotional depth and knowledge in literature and journalism enable them to write convincing news analyses and wide-ranging commentaries.
If AI writers were to completely replace human reporters, there would be no difference in the perspective and content of news. As a result, readers would be less sensitive to the different meanings implied in a text and even become less tolerant of any views that are not mainstream.
The advance of AI will inevitably affect all aspects of mass communication, in which information plays a key role. Facebook, Google, Apple and other high-tech companies have all invested in products related to news information. With funds from those major high-tech companies, it would not be difficult to discover the perfect algorithm to quickly generate a news story catering to popular taste.
However, good news stories that are intelligent, interesting or inspiring can still only be written by humans who care about society and about producing high-quality journalism. If they cease to exist because expectations for information have changed, society will change dramatically.
Chao Che-sheng is an assistant professor at Kainan University’s Department of Information Communications.
Translated by Tu Yu-an
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