Comment by shagie
9 hours ago
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/05/20/406484294/an-n...
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The rules for the race: Both contenders waited for Denny's, the diner company, to come out with an earnings report. Once that was released, the stopwatch started. Both wrote a short radio story and get graded on speed and style.
https://www.wired.com/story/wordsmith-robot-journalist-downl... https://archive.ph/gSdmb
And this has been going on for a while... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_journalism
StatSheet, an online platform covering college basketball, runs entirely on an automated program. In 2006, Thomson Reuters announced their switch to automation to generate financial news stories on its online news platform. Reuters used a tool called Tracer. An algorithm called Quakebot published a story about a 2014 California earthquake on The Los Angeles Times website within three minutes after the shaking had stopped.
Sports and financial are the two easiest to do since they both work from well structured numeric statistics.
I like Quakebot as an example of how to do this kind of thing ethically and with integrity: https://www.latimes.com/people/quakebot
> Quakebot is a software application developed by the Los Angeles Times to report the latest earthquakes as fast as possible. The computer program reviews earthquake notices from the U.S. Geological Survey and, if they meet certain criteria, automatically generates a draft article. The newsroom is alerted and, if a Times editor determines the post is newsworthy, the report is published.
> The computer program reviews earthquake notices from the U.S. Geological Survey
Probably a service that is provided to the general public for free, similar to NOAA and weather data - so chances are rather high it ends up on the chopping block or for-money only.