Are robots coming for your job?
A computer that can write sport reports, a program that creates billboards and banner ads. Are machines muscling in on your job or are they just trying to free you up to do more of the good stuff? In a feature that first appeared in Encore, Matt Smith investigates.
So here’s a short news story from Forbes.com: “Analysts have become increasingly bullish on Apple (AAPL) in the month leading up to the company’s second quarter earnings announcement scheduled for Tuesday, April 24, 2012. The consensus earnings per share estimate has moved up from US$9.60 a share to the current expectation of earnings of US$9.86 a share.”
The structure might be somewhat formulaic, but it gets the job done and has all the numbers you’d expect in an article about stock market changes. Unlike most things you read, it isn’t written by a soft mushy human with its twiddley fragile fingers. It’s written by a computer algorithm which sorts through data, looks at patterns, and presents a story with an acceptable amount of prose. \
And it didn’t even need to use a keyboard. The engine is called Quill, an advanced writing algorithm developed by Narrative Science, an American software company. Far be it for this precursor to Skynet – the artificial intelligence unit that featured in the Arnold Schwarzenegger film Terminator – to just be happy churning out finance stories, it’s also muscling in on reporting sport scores as well. Given adequate data, it can produce fast copy, regardless of the hour, the pay, or the caffeine content.
As a journalist it has its limitations. It still relies on what Narrative Science calls ‘meta-writers’, people to format templates for Quill to input data to. It’s output lacks linguistic flair, and falls squarely into the ‘adequate’ category.
My boring job turned me into a robot.
Hasta la vista, baby!!