News organisations say the bots are not intended to displace human reporters or editors but rather to help free them from the most monotonous tasks, such as sports results and earnings reports. – EPA pic, March 9, 2019.
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 programs – 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.
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