Robot journalists to write up quarterly earnings stories on companies like Krispy Kreme.
Today, a handful of content mills circumnavigate the need to have any humans involved at all. These aren't backstreet backlink marketeers, either: outlets as big as the Associated Press have cut some costs by employing (or deploying) robot journalists to write up quarterly earnings stories on companies like Krispy Kreme. This kind of robotic software can take a bunch of statistics such as company results--or baseball and basketball scores--and create content. A company called Automated Insights created this automated writer fleet, and the firm's robotic authors produced more than a billion pieces of content last year (likely for a fraction of the price that even the cheapest content mill can get away with paying). Compared to the shoehorned-in keywords that sometimes cause mill writers to mangle sentences in ways Shakespeare would blench at, Automated Insights' work could be in contention for a Pulitzer.
Chris Stokel-Walker is a freelance journalist, writing features for the BBC and The Sunday Times of London. He is based in the United Kingdom.
Bonus thought: could robo-journalists avoid biased reviews such as those of June Chu, Dean of Yale University's Pierson College ?