Robot Journalism

The following sections are included:

• Preface
• About the Authors
• Acknowledgments
• Contents

Artificial Intelligence (AI), smart algorithms, and automatic processes are penetrating all aspects of human communications and human organizations, dramatically changing media platforms as well as the relations between the media and their consumers. The potential loss of human jobs as a result of such automation has become a major global issue. According to leading forecasters, almost 50% of current human jobs are at risk [Rainie and Anderson, 2017]. In this book, I have chosen to focus on the future of human journalism in the coming era of AI and automation. The potential elimination of human journalism poses real dangers to Western democracy, even to the point of endangering democratic societies’ survival. The book is also relevant to other human content producers to whom it offers a more optimistic perspective on the opportunities that AI offers…

Journalism is a combination of art and science. The artistic nature of journalistic work is manifested in the search for new creative ideas, new creative angles to cover a story, new thoughts, new solutions to problems, and new ways of enriching the lives of audiences. The scientific part of journalistic work involves the use of analytical tools to support and validate information and ideas on the basis of data silos where human activity is recorded and stored. Current Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms provide human journalists with data analytics tools to explore and identify insights from huge data silos, and also provide journalists with algorithms to write basic narrative texts, but such algorithms lack the ability to enrich a journalism story using the mix of innovative technologies and applications that is demanded by the younger generations.

Automatic narration is emerging as a new field of research led by artificial intelligence (AI) software writers taking advantage of the vast body of knowledge in linguistics and the study of natural language. In automatic narration, AI algorithms are employed to automatically convert facts and new insights derived from data silos (also by AI tools) into readable stories, without human involvement, in a fraction of a second. Several commercial companies have already developed AI algorithms that write complete journalistic stories and adjust their tone and narrative structure to predefined audience profiles. It is estimated that within 5–10 years, the majority of all journalistic text stories will be written by robots. Welcome to the world of robotic journalism…

The following sections are included:

• The Moment of Birth of Big Data and Analytics
• How Are Data Analyzed?
• Data and the Cloud Revolution
• Data Tell a Story
• Advanced Analytics — Data Science, Data Mining, and AI
• Analytics as a Service
• Data as a Product — Data Monetization
• Reference

Automatic processes employing AI algorithms are penetrating all aspects of news production and dissemination: All forms of news content are being automatically tagged for efficient subsequent news searches; Algorithms search for new insights in huge data silos and automatically compose narratives without human involvement; and finally, AI engines target the news per the consumers’ digital profiles. There are predictions that these automatic processes will lead to fully automated news rooms without human journalists.

The media industry has been undergoing accelerated change, driven largely by the proliferation of digital platforms. This transformation is sometimes referred to as the “Third Technological Revolution”, following the printing press and the industrial revolutions. Its enormous impact transcends technology and engenders substantial changes across society [Einav, 2014], as new digital media platforms, including Smartphones and social networks, fundamentally affect the way we communicate with one another. In this chapter, we argue that the adoption of digital technologies and the resulting media habits have not only transformed interpersonal communication norms, but have also transformed storytelling as we know it. We refer to the new approaches to storytelling adopted by brands, advertisers, news platforms, and journalists, as the “New News Story”. We begin this chapter by exploring the key consumer behavior trends related to the sweeping adoption of digital media platforms and their impact on how brands communicate with their consumers. The second part of the chapter focuses on how adoption of digital media platforms has transformed storytelling in the news industry.

Immersive journalism is a subcategory of journalism that uses virtual reality (VR) and similar technologies to provide those engaging in such technologies with a sense of being wholly engrossed in the news story, thus allowing the news audience to form a direct impression of the ambience of the story. This chapter is intended to serve as a primer of VR use for news storytelling for individuals with an interest or background in journalism. The first section presents some essential background on VR and related technologies. Next, we present some research findings on the impact of VR, and review some of the early work in immersive journalism. We conclude by delineating a collection of thoughts and questions for journalists wishing to enter into this new exciting field.

Human journalists put their lives at risk when covering many of today’s global conflict zones. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 107 journalists have been killed since the start of the civil war in Syria in 2013, including 14 deaths in 2016 and 18 in 2017 [https://cpj.org/killed/2017/]. In addition to the physical dangers, the experience of a conflict zone and actual contact with the human suffering create psychological challenges for journalists, as they do for ordinary citizens. In fact, the psychological impact of coverage of the human suffering causes many journalists severe traumatic stress from which they may continue to suffer throughout their lives; Studies show that 28.6% of war correspondents are afflicted with lifetime post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) [Feinstein et al., 2002, 2014]. The Journalism School at Columbia University established the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma (dartcenter.org) to study and help journalists suffering from PTSD, and to prepare journalists for covering war zones…

The introduction of new machinery and technologies has always prompted queries about potential effects on the journalism tradition — its content, its means of production, and its consumption. A quite recent development in the realm of digital journalism, software-generated content, or automatically produced content [Clerwall, 2014], has produced studies that have analyzed and discussed how this technological development is being implemented in newsrooms, its effect on newsrooms [Cottle and Ashton, 1999] and journalism practice [Franklin, 2008; Pavlik, 2000], and how journalists consider this development and its impact on their role as journalists [Linden, 2017; van Dalen, 2012]. The aim of this chapter, however, is to look at the field of sports journalism. Against the specific backdrop of sports journalism’s content, means of production, and consumption, the question this chapter will try to answer is whether the recent introduction of automatically produced content is merely another evolutionary stage in the field of sport journalism, or has it triggered a revolution that can be defined as a “game changer”, with respect to both production and consumption in this area?

The following sections are included:

• Introduction
• Big Data and Bureaucracy
• Cybernetics
• The Cybernetic Model
• Sociocybernetics and General Systems Theory
• Social Development Theory
• AI and Cybernetics
• The Ethics and Governance of AI Fund
• References

Many leading scientists claim that computers will eventually be able to do everything the human brain is capable of doing — only better. Major research institutions, public and private (IBM, Google, Intel, Microsoft, and leading academic institutions), are attempting to design artificial brains that fully emulate the human brain, notwithstanding the beliefs of many people, including Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Stephen Hawking, that AI is more dangerous to the human race than the atom bomb. One of the more practical and immediate concerns of artificial intelligence is the loss of human jobs to robots and automation. For journalists, this concern is compounded by the rapid penetration of Artificial Intelligence into all media platforms…

The following section is included:

• Index