Google gives $1M grant to Press Association to develop robot journalists

New consumers of the future could be reading stories pieced together by advanced data-analyzing robots rather than human journalists, if Google has its way.

On Thursday, the Press Association, the U.K.’s national news agency, announced that it received €706,000 from the tech giant for its Reporters and Data an Robots (RADAR)     1    .

A collaboration between the Press Association and data-driven news start-up Urbs Media, RADAR aims to set up an artificial intelligene-fueled, news service that will generate tens of thousands of news stories a month using publicly     2     data.

Everyone from big-name news organizations to hyper-local outlets and bloggers could     3     from the program. Press Association editor-in-chief Peter Clifton claimed, “this is a hugely exciting development, and we believe our     4     with Urbs Media can be a genuine game-changer for media outlets across the U. K. and Ireland.”

According to the Press Association, RADAR won’t     5     mark the end of the flesh-and-blood journalists, but will rather enable the AI to produce a volume of stories that would be impossible to match manually.

The envisioned work-flow would begin with human journalists identifying open data sets and “creating detailed story templates across a(n)     6     of topics including crime, health and employment.” The robotic reporter would then take over and scan the data, use language generation software to craft together story text and automatically locate relevant photos and video. Press Association clients would then be able to use a special distribution platform to identify news stories of     7     to their audience.

Content automation isn’t a totally     8     concept in the news industry however. AP estimated that it can free up 20 per cent of journalists’ time, allowing them to focus on more complex, qualitative tasks.

Shockingly, not all journalists are sold on the AI infiltration. A study found that journalists from leading news organizations had several reservations when shown an automatically     9     sports story. “I would never, ever, ever have written a story like that,” one BBC journalist said, while a CNN reporter thought the story was repetitive and lacked variation.

Nevertheless, it looks like AI in journalism is here to stay. At a time when many media outlets are     10     commercial pressure, RADAR will provide the news ecosystem with a cost-effective way to provide insightful local stories.

You’ll Never Be Truly Alone

In the decades to come, a large number of home robots could make today’s appliances seem interesting. The market for consumer and office robots is expected to develop quickly in the next three years, according to a 2015 report by Business Insider Intelligence, being greater than $1.5 billion and far     1     the growth of robots in manufacturing.

We already have robots that clean the house, like the Roomba, but in the future we’ll also have robot arms that can     2     surfaces and bathe people, says Christopher Atkeson, a roboticist at Carnegie Mellon, whose lab has produced such machines. Eventually, robots will fold laundry and cook meals. And if they work well, you won’t even notice them. The key to effective robots is ”being     3    of predicting what people will do,“ says Julie Shah, the head of the Interactive Robotics Group at MIT. ”The idea is either     4     people or staying out of their way.“

That said, some people may want a robot that hangs around. In Japan, a friendly humanoid robot called Pepper that can    5    and respond to human emotion has proved enormously popular since it went on sale two years ago. Pepper might turn out to be the     6    roommate- helpful, kind, and always up for hanging out, but never in the way.

Perhaps the already     7    line between online and offline life will disappear, and human relationships with intelligent machines will represent a new extension of our social    8    . Your in-hour robot could serve as an avatar(化身)for friends and family,     9     from afar so that, with the help of robotic arms and legs, you could dance with or hug a loved one who is halfway around the planet. The real     10    of - or problem with - the house of the future, then, might be that you’ll never have to leave it. However, what the future house will be like still remains to be seen.