The Associated Press has been using a program called Wordsmith in producing most of the publishing company's news. Close to 4300 stories in a year's quarter, this makes it 14 times more that its previous story output over the years.
An American tech company known as Automated Insights, published a case study regarding the Wordsmith program and how it has helped the Associated Press in producing stories. Last January, the publishing company revealed that they have been using Wordsmith to produce content since July 2014 without human supervision.
The Associated Press has implemented Wordsmith specifically for articles related to the business sector that involved corporate stocks, earnings, and market performances. This technology has also been used by Allstate, Yahoo, and Greatcall for stock-related news that covers a lot of figures.
Write-ups can be very time consuming when done manually and there is the likelihood for human errors as writers face a lot of numerical figures in business articles. The Wordsmith program can produce these kind of write-ups in a flash and can have a few errors at least if none.
Human writers should not be distressed about losing their jobs. At least not at the moment, as the program is still in its early forms. The Wordsmith program is more of a tool that AP use for generating write-ups that deals with a lot of figures. Journalists and columnists can focus on other write-ups for publishing and the program is not used to compete with journalists' writing capabilities.
Though it is not yet a possibility, it cannot be denied that the software progresses as it gets developed further. By that time, Wordsmith could have the capability of replicating editorial write-ups.
New York Times columnist Barbara Ehrenreich said that there is a threat of robots doing journalism. And yes, it is unavoidable that Wordsmith can be developed further to replicate writing styles and even articulate ideas.
Although the technology is not quite there, a robot could never understand to justify or describe human feelings when writing an article. The fact of the matter is that humans are still superior when it comes to write-ups as human journalists can sense anything compared to robots and experience-based articles are what robots cannot do.
