Computerized Reporters: Will Robots Soon Replace Journalists?

It's hard to imagine that all the news we read in newspapers and magazines might soon be written by robots. However, some experts argue that tech companies have developed clever computer programs that are capable of independently drafting editorial texts.

Berlin-based company Retresco is offering such software programs for sale. In an interview with Sputnik Germany, the company's commercial director Johannes Sommer outlined his vision of what digital journalism will look like in the near future.

"The weather, stock news, football — our program can write articles on all these topics," Sommer told Sputnik.

According to Sommer, this happens so quickly that none of the journalists would have any chance to compete with the program. "The process takes a few milliseconds. Let's take a football game: immediately after the final whistle, you get a text," the expert said.

However, the reality is not as bad as it seems. Sommer noted that the software can develop articles only if it is given relevant information.

"An important prerequisite for the automatic generation of texts are structured data," he said. And this data can be collected and saved in the program only by humans.

According to Sommer, people usually do not notice any difference between news written by a human being or a machine. However, it mostly concerns only factual news.

In Sommer's opinion, a person can describe things that the machine does not understand. "For example, why a player was given the red card? Or what was the reaction of the coach?"

Thus, the expert doesn't believe that journalists should be preparing for a dark future. However, he pointed out that media employees should get used to new technologies and learn to use them as tools.

According to Sommer, there will be more and more automatically written texts in the future as modern computers can cover very large amounts of data and process them into texts. This trend might prove to be especially challenging for news agencies, he argued.

"The identical texts that the agencies send to different media outlets can be replaced by the automatic texts that will be written individually for each customer," Sommer concluded.