Journalists Fear Robots Will Take Jobs

Automated Insights, a robot-making company, is selling robots to the Associated Press to use for writing business stories, which until now has traditionally been the job of a paid reporter, according to The Daily Caller.

Associated Press Managing Editor Lou Ferrara said journalists shouldn’t worry about losing their jobs.

“If anything, we are doubling down on the journalism we will do around earnings reports and business coverage,” Ferrara said in a statement to Poynter.

According to Ferrara, AP has already been using “automation” for sports stories, so this is nothing new. In March, the Los Angeles Times used a robot to write up a brief on an earthquake only three minutes after it happened on an early Monday morning. That’s faster than any human reporter.

Popular Science explains the technology by reminding readers that stories written by robots are usually based off of data entry and aggregation.

“The most basic reports involve plugging numbers from a database into one of a few standard narratives,” Popular Science reported. “That said, automatically written stories don’t have to be too terrible to read. The biggest argument for robot journalism is that it frees human reporters to do the kind of deeper reporting only people can do.”

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