Approximately 50 freelance news editors at MSN will see their jobs vaporize July 1 when they’re replaced by robots, according to a story in the Seattle Times.
Those journalists had helped punch-up the MSN news site by selecting trending news stories written by reporters at other online news sites.
They also came up with alternative, creative headlines for the content.
And they added fresh supporting photos or slide shows to the stories, as appropriate.
But all that work will now be done by artificial intelligence, according to Seattle Times writer Geoff Baker.
“It’s demoralizing to think machines can replace us,” said an anonymous news editor slashed from MSN. “But there you go.”
In other AI-generated writing news:
*Robot Takeover at MSN: No Worry to AI Writing Expert: While Microsoft has turned heads with its decision to replace humans with robots at MSN, Noam Lemelshtrich Latar is nonplused.
He’s dean of the Sammy Ofer School of Communications at IDC Herzliya and author of “Robot Journalism: Can Human Journalism Survive?”
Latar’s take on Microsoft’s move: The human editors replaced at MSN were engaged in repetitive, easily automated functions like story selection, headline generation and image matching.
Essentially, those editors – unlike highly creative writers – were playing on AI’s home turf, he says.
But when it comes to highly creative editorial tasks, AI currently faces much stiffer competition from humans, Latar says.
“Human creativity is not limited by rational thought,” Latar says. “That’s why the chances of winning the battle against robots are high.”
*Don’t Fear the Robot: Count Analytics India as another journal skeptical of the feared wholesale replacement of writers with robots.
The fact is, news stories generated by AI currently are no match for human stories born from critical thinking, empathy and creativity, according to this piece.
*Oops: MSN’s AI Runs Wrong Photo With News Story: MSN’s much-ballyhooed AI editing system just got dinged for running the wrong photo with one of its curated news stories.
The AI selected the news feature for its probing perspective on racism from Jade Thirwall, a member of the band Little Mix.
But there was one problem: The photo MSN’s AI ran along with the story was wrongly identified as a picture of Thirwall.
Instead, the image depicted one of her bandmembers.
*German Broadcaster Revs Up AI + Automation Lab: Public service radio and TV broadcaster Bayerischer Rundfunk has added a new lab to help infuse AI into its news operation.
“Machine learning can offer great opportunities,” says Uli Köppen, lead at the lab. “But you really need to have the right use case.
“One of our goals is to regionalize stories — perhaps in an automated, or semi-automated way.”
Köppen’s background in AI includes work as a 2019 Nieman Fellow at Harvard and MIT.
She specialized at both institutions in journalism automation and algorithmic accountability.
One of Köppen’s primary goals — the automation of regional news stories — is already well underway at UK-based Radar.
The news service regularly auto-produces thousands of news stories each month from data drawn from British government and similar public databases.
Radar is currently squired by six journalists.
They create AI story templates, which reach down into databases to produce hyper-localized trend stories.
Using the method, Radar was able to hyper-localize a government database chronicling crime across Great Britain and come up with a story entitled, “Hackney: The home of bike theft in London.”
Another example of Radar’s AI hyper-localization: A story examining health trends in the UK with the headline, “Figures reveal NHS spends millions prescribing gluten-free food for patients.”
*Three More News Organizations Join AI Research Project: Archant, Reach and Bristol Cable have joined a consortium of news outlets exploring AI’s potential in journalism.
The effort – now 21 news organizations strong and dubbed ‘JournalismAI Collab’ — is led by journalism think-tank Polis, headquartered at the London School of Economics.
“Together, we will start a six-month journey to discover, test and demonstrate the potential of AI and machine learning,” in journalism, observes Mattia Peretti, a Polis spokesperson.
Adds Jarno Koponen, head of AI & personalization, Yle News Lab: “The Collab is a unique opportunity for journalists across the world to come together and figure out how can we bring together journalistic work, AI and new user interfaces in the most effective and sustainable way.”
*Marketer: AI’s Writing Prowess Too Often Exagerated: Content marketing strategist Peter Springett says highly creative copywriters need not fret over AI stealing their jobs.
“AI can write articles — just not complicated ones,” observes Springett, a consultant at Digital Leadership Associates. “This is known as robo-journalism — the automated writing of stories based on structured data.”
“It works well for deadline-driven stories, based on sports results, financial news, weather and elections,” he adds.
But for more sophisticated pieces, humans still dust algorithms, according to Springett.
“The machines aren’t coming for your jobs,” Springett observes. “But other journalists are.
“Make sure you’re equipped with the skills and training to succeed in this brave new world.”
*Today’s AI-Generated Writing: Best for Highly Structured Text: While many experts believe it will be some time before AI can muster the creativity to write a novel, current AI tools are great for churning-out highly structured writing, according to Max Frenzel.
He’s a researcher in AI creativity with a PhD in physics.
“When I worked on the business side of things — and really working on this AI for business analysts and looking at news data — what we found is that the more structured a language is, the easier a time AI has at actually getting information out of that,” Frenzel says.
“For example, legal texts are very, very easy for an AI to understand because it follows very strict patterns and has very clear rules,” he adds.
Frenzel has more insights on AI and creativity – including its use in writing – in a wide-ranging interview on The Creative Penn.
The Q&A is also available as a one-hour podcast on the site.
*OpenAI Rolls-Out Upgrade of Fake News Generator: Open AI has unveiled an enhanced version of its AI text generator, dubbed GPT-3.
Retooled with enhanced computing horsepower, the software is good at creating short stories.
But it still has problems creating credible, long-form prose, according to ZDnet’s Tiernan Ray.
“Building a neural network that just predicts probabilities of the next word in any sentence or phrase may have its limits,” Ray observers.
“Just making it ever-more-powerful and stuffing it with ever-more-text may not yield better results,” he adds.
The text generator’s predecessor — GPT-2 — triggered an uproar last year over fears that bad actors would hijack it to auto-generate fake news across the Web.
*Industry Group Readies Ethics Guide for Adopting AI in PR: The Chartered Institute of Public Relations is putting the final touches on an ethical guide to AI’s use in PR, according to Kerry Sheehan.
Sheehan is the artificial intelligence in PR chair at the Institute.
“Trustworthy and purposeful businesses, organizations and brands will be those who clearly and transparently demonstrate they have developed AI responsibly and communicate it effectively,” Sheehan says.
*Special Feature: Company Reports That Write Themselves
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–Joe Dysart is editor of RobotWritersAI.com and a tech journalist with 20+ years experience. His work has appeared in 150+ publications, including The New York Times and the Financial Times of London.