AI and the Future of News

Worried AI will steal your job and make journalists and copywriters obsolete? AI is getting more sophisticated and can do things many wouldn’t have believed possible decades ago. However, will it take over news reporters’ jobs altogether?

According to an experiment conducted by Financial Times, that’s unlikely. It proved that journalists have nothing to fear when it comes to keeping their jobs. They did a simple test—gave a human journalist and her AI counterpart Emma the same piece to write.

While Emma’s writing style was good, the AI “lacked the most important journalistic skill of all: the ability to distinguish the newsworthy from the dull.” True, Emma could provide an interesting write-up, but it didn’t flash out the important information.

What does it mean for the future of news?

Journalists and reporters will definitely use AI technology. In fact, many of them may already be doing it. They may be using fact-checker apps, online writing assistant Grammarly, or research automation apps like Connexun’s AI News Engine or BBC’s Juicer.

AI, machine learning, and data science can all help journalists become better at their jobs and create better and more insightful pieces with less time wasted on research. An app that collects and cross-references data across multiple international sources can provide a much wider spectrum of information than any human’s research capabilities.  

There is also another type of application available online, Natural Language Generators. These apps turn numbers into stories. Narrative Science offers tools for data storytelling so that companies can turn raw data into stories, making it understandable and interesting to everyone. These can be used to highlight the most important information and present it in a more palatable way. 

If you don’t trust the AI to do the job right, you can get in touch and we’ll write your story for you – using humans, not robots.

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