Major US news organisations to develop ROBOT JOURNALISTS In a development whose potential sinister consequences would be difficult to exaggerate, a number of major US new organisations have banded together in an alliance for the purpose of developing news-gathering robots. Nor is this some sort of HuffPost blogswarm news aggregation scrap-o-matic system: this plan would see actual …
I dunno, news being reported by unbiased robo-reporters, recorded accurately and with no personal bias or spin kinda appeals.
Then of course the editors get their hands on the story and spin it right round baby.
Maybe we can have robo-ed's. Maybe El Reg should have a trial with that, after all, editors are just meat-based censorship devices, right?
While Fox News takes the extreme conservative viewpoint, much of mainstream news takes an extreme liberal stance.
If the mud slinging, personal attacks and other distractions were removed, I would be very happy with making our "leadership" defend their positions on the issues. Like that's going to happen. In this age of reality TV, one has to have gratuitous insults (bleeped or not), epithets, and physical violence to achieve any sort of ratings (LCD). I like to think that TV would be better, and I'd start watching it again more frequently, if there were far fewer channels with much better content.
Robo reporters makes perfect sense.
I already have a robo reader that I use to limit the amount of news I read and lets me focus only on the important stuff.
So robo reporters writing for robo readers that distill it down to simple soundbites I can digest on the run.
Pretty soon, there will be no man in the loop and then we could spoof the news and cause wide spread panic as the robo readers for the trading companies that buy and sell stock based on social medai's sentiment analysis will start to buy or sell certain stocks due to said spoofs.
I can't wait. I'll make a fortune!!!! :-)
(cue evil laugh)
You now realize that Philip K. Dick actually saw reality as it really is.
UBIK beer, what else!
miming everything that Associated Press used to put on the teletype? Print media did this forever and still do even though the teletype no longer rattles in the corner.
If you browse the web news site, most stories are recaps of other sites news which are lifted from some other source.
The Register does this regularly.
> Initially the plans call for the robot journalists to confine themselves to flying about in the skies overhead
The journalist drones fly around looking for interesting things happening on the ground... and at the same time keep half-an-eye on their nearest neighbour competitor drone in case that spots something first. When it sees the competitor drone drop down to investigate, it will fly over and do the same. And so will the neighbouring drone watching it, and so on.
Just like vultures.
(Time to beef-up the copyrights on your logo, El Reg.)
A story suitable for The Onion. Robo Journalists wouldn't gather news, they'd gather data and a massive rank of editors would have to sift through all of the muck to find a few diamonds.
Peter Hurley, a noted portrait photographer, tried out a very high resolution RED video camera on a session to see if having 30 or 60 frames per second would allow him to get the perfect image of somebody in his studio. Technically, the video frames were high quality enough, but sorting through what amounts to 10's or 100's of thousands of images was a chore and a half. Just as he knows when to press the shutter to capture the best image, a human reporter will know what is news and what is noise. Would it be the same if the Red Light District was automated?
Please, create a robotic Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf, of former Iraqi Information Minister fame.
He's at least as accurate as MSNBC, but with a more pleasing look and conviction.
Bonus: I'm sure he won't feel compelled to ask Eric Holder to quack like a duck!
We already have robot reporters in the US -- it's called the MSM (mainstream media). NBC, CBS, and ABC. Oh and over in this corner, with all the other water-carriers for the Democrat White House, are CNN and MSNBC, who are having a competition to see how many people you can fit into a thimble...
Wow were getting physical robots that will scour for info instead of what could be done with automated scripts?
Seriously any web programmer could make a script that will scour AP for news, and run a thesaurus on a few words(something a good chunk of journalist don't bother) to change it up a little, and repost it as theirs.
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