Experiment Will Produce "Journalism" With Robotic Automation

"Why the hell is Del Signore taking so long to reblog that PSFK post?"

A Carnegie Mellon research team specializing in human-computer interaction is conducting an experiment to see if they can create "an automated system for producing quality journalism using an army of untrained workers." Using the Amazon.com "Mechanical Turk" crowd-sourcing marketplace, the experiment, dubbed "My Boss Is A Robot," will attempt to produce a 500-word article on a newly-released scientific paper. An automated software system will use the unskilled workers on Mechanical Turk, assigning them tasks like reading the abstract and identifying the most interesting aspects. Hm, this all sounds very familiar...:

When it’s done, the workers, overseen by the software, will have selected the angle that the story will take. (Mechanical Turk is fast. This might happen in minutes). The rest of the process—writing, editing, fact-checking—will work in a similar way. So if it does actually work, the system will be totally automated. Meaning that we will feed a scientific paper into this human-powered machine and, a few days later, out will pop a piece of journalism.
More to come soon on exactly how we’re going to do this, the results from the first stages of the experiment, plus some thoughts on whether we should even be referring to the results as journalism.

Real journalists probably shouldn't feel threatened by this system yet, but if it's a success, entire editorial departments could be replaced by automated machines, with computer algorithms determining what's newsworthy and how the news should be packaged. And instead of paying a paltry sum to Mechanical Turk, the machines could easily get interns to do that grunt work for free!... Uh-oh—when you really think about it, this nightmarish endeavor sounds less like the journalism of the future and more like the blogging of the present. These machines must be stopped before they render human rebloggers obsolete! [Via PSFK]

Contact the author of this article or email tips@gothamist.com with further questions, comments or tips.

By John Del Signore in News on February 9, 2011 1:39 PM

Comments [rss]

cmdrogogov

...implying journalism in the USA isn't a joke already.

Joshua Nierstheimer

You can poke fun at journalists but it's not going to be funny when they come after your profession which they will. What happens when they develop a robot that decides what to teach children or one that decides how to run a Fortune 500 company. Check out people at the grocery store. Laugh while you can and your job is still intact. I thought machines would not make it to replacing so many humans. They replaced them at movie stores, libraries, radio stations, somewhat TV stations, music stores, technical support, and soon journalism.

Dubai Directory

Be Careful robot journalist is overturning professions. If we want to save all our jobs from the computers then we need to invest more time in developing our creativity cause we can't beat computers at their own game.

xgeyiph772

*written by undercover robot computer*

Mad Joy

I'm sorry, but this is really stupid. I use Mechanical Turk sometimes because it's a fun way to procrastinate on random, interesting tasks that actually pays a little bit of money. I actually participated in this Carnegie Mellon "research" without really knowing what it is about. It's not robotic at all - it's just crowd-sourcing. I did this "summarization" task based on an abstract, but I have a research background in the social sciences.

This is only automated in the sense that it makes it easier to find people willing to do the work cheap and fast :/ It's still humans producing the output at each stage.

I guess the real issue is that they're assuming Mechanical Turk labor is necessarily unskilled. I don't think that's true. Real human beings are often skilled at this kind of task through the normal course of a standard education.

John_Del_Signore

Ooops, forgot to add the TOUNGE IN CHEEK IRONY tag for the literal-minded Gothamist readers.

asakasan

while you're at it, add the "snarky" tag. Oh, wait, that's a given.

shampoomohawk

There's a tag for that? ......Oh, wait. I get it.

xgeyiph772

You must be a blast at parties John. Such a kidder.

RabbiLaFunque

Mindless robots bringing us the news...how is this different from the current model of American journalism?

xgeyiph772

+1000. Ever notice that the 12pm news on WCBS-2 is almost a word-for-word rehash of that morning's New York Post? And that stories on different news channels have the exact same video? Even local newspapers that used to cater to residents of a particular town now use AP wire stories and Google Map street views instead of dispatching reporters and photogs to take pics. Very sad.

shampoomohawk

"...with computer algorithms determining what's newsworthy and how the news should be packaged."

Yeah, that sounds like a huge change from the current system.