‘Bot’ produces 40,000 stories in 5 minutes
washington — A text-generating “bot” nicknamed Tobi produced nearly 40,000 news stories about the results of the November 2018 elections in Switzerland for the media giant Tamedia — in just five minutes.
These kinds of artificial intelligence programmes — available for nearly a decade — are becoming more widespread as news organisations turn to them to produce stories, personalise news delivery and in some cases sift through data to find important news.
Tobi wrote on vote results for each of Switzerland’s 2,222 municipalities, in both French and German, for the country’s largest media group, according to a paper presented last month at the Computation + Journalism conference in Miami. A similar automated programme called Heliograf has enabled daily to cover some 500 election races, along with local sports and business, since 2014.
News organisations say the bots are not intended to displace human reporters but to help free them from the most monotonous tasks, such as sports results and earnings reports.
Similar conversations are going on in newsrooms around the world.
developed a “quakebot” that quickly distributes news articles on temblors in the region and also uses an automated system as part of its Homicide Report.
The Associated Press has been automating quarterly earnings reports
for some 3,000 listed companies. Reuters last year announced the launch of Lynx Insight, which uses automated data analysis to identify trends and anomalies and to suggest stories reporters should write.
Bloomberg’s computerised system called Cyborg “dissects a company’s
earnings the moment they appear” and produces within seconds a “mini-wrap with all the numbers and a lot of context
France’s and its partner Syllabs deployed a computer program that generated 150,000 web pages covering 36,000 municipalities in the 2015 polls. —