When will politics and political journalism be farmed out to robots? If you watched last night’s election debate and its aftermath without the protection of a hazmat suit, you might be asking: how soon could it be?
Quite soon, it seems. A current New Yorker article points out that the Associated Press will now reply on “automation technology” to cover some college sports – technology that “can analyze the data from a game of anything from badminton to basketball and then use it to write a coherent and familiar-looking recap”. It takes a split second to produce, needless to say, and will soon incorporate post-game quotes from players and quasi-idiosyncratic sportswriter-type prose.
Plenty of news output is already computer-generated: the software that will cover sport in this way has been providing most of AP’s corporate-results stories since last year, when the robot was predicted to churn out a billion news stories – and it probably didn’t once stick a massive bar bill on expenses.