Microsoft made waves this May when it announced that it would lay off more than 50 journalists and editors from its workforce. Many of these employees were involved in the news curation process, selecting hand-picked content that would run on the Microsoft News and MSN websites. But their positions won’t go unfilled for long: Microsoft is expected to replace them not with new hires, but with AI software that can identify trending and interesting articles, essentially performing their old job function.
But curation is just one task that AI “journalists” can now accomplish. Kristian Hammond, a computer science professor and co-founder of the data storytelling company Narrative Science, predicted in 2012 that in 15 years, more than 90 per cent of news articles would be written by a computer. With 7 years to go until the deadline, however, we’re still very far off from this forecast—yet also much closer than we used to be, as we’ll discuss below.
The good news for human journalists is that there’s still very much a need for their services when writing articles like this one. But with machines now capable of doing more tasks than ever (and more complex ones), we face several important questions: what’s ...
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