The Robots Are Coming: ‘Chinese Robot Reporter’ Xiaomingbot’s Olympic coverage

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly becoming a part of newsrooms across the world, and the most recent example of this was Toutiao news, a search engine and news syndication service in China. The website used its “AI writing robot” or Chinese robot reporter, Xiaomingbot to write 30 to 40 pieces a day during the Olympics. On August 14 it had a record 58 pieces. Most of the pieces produced by the robot were 100 words long and this particular copy, published after two minutes of when the match ended, had garnered 50,000 views already.

The writing might not be smooth but it gives the right amount of details without beating around the bush. And this is the reason why many news agencies, such as Associated Press (AP) have taken to these robots to churn out stories faster. According to this report, AP has been using a news automation editor since 2015 to automatically generate more than 3,000 stories about U.S. corporate earnings each quarter. Other news outlets such as On The Wight, Forbes and the Los Angeles Times  have also taken to robots.

And though using AI for journalism has proven beneficial to newsrooms, there are also some potential pitfalls mentioned in the handy Guide to Automated Journalism produced by Tow Center for Digital Journalism in January, 2016. While the AI maybe able to churn copies on an event like Olympics and impact data journalism in a big way, the robots are not replacing the journalists just yet.