Eric Goldschein | Business Insider
In a development that smacks of Terminators and SKYNET, startup Narrative Science has created a program that can turn data into a news stories — stories that include, most humanely, inferences and an angle.
PopSci reported the development.
Whether statistics from a football game or housing sales figures, the robot journalist culls the numbers and puts a journalistic spin on them, writing stories faster than human competitors can for $10 per 500-word article.
Narrative Software is promoting the software as a tool to expand and supplement coverage in budget-conscious newsrooms.
The program has been utilized by a reported 20 clients for awhile now. The Big Ten Network, for example, has been using the software since spring of 2010 to recap their games. The articles feature human vernacular and euphemisms:
“Wisconsin jumped out to an early lead and never looked back in a 51-17 win over UNLV on Thursday at Camp Randall Stadium.”
With Narrative Science already putting out content comparable to Internet sports writers, it isn’t hard to imagine a future of excellent robot journalism covering our top news stories. One of the company’s founders was quoted as predicting that “a computer program will win a Pulitzer within five years.”
That might be a bit of a stretch, but more likely — and scary for those of us in the journalism business — is the replacement of human writers with cheaper, faster machines, as seen in countless other industries over the years. Once a computer program can mimic the human element, the actual “human” can quickly be replaced.
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The original version of the story appears here: http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-the-robot-journalist-program-that-will-put-us-out-of-a-job-in-five-years-2011-9
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