Certain people at Google believe that the solution to the fake news crisis might be to take news out of the hands of writers.
Google’s Digital News Initiative has recently set aside $805,000 to fund an initiative seeking to create a program that can automatically generate news. The software will be called RADAR (Reporters And Data And Robots) which has the capabilities to generate more than 30,000 stories a month. The program would be relegated to financial and niche sports stories, much like the model employed by The Associated Press.
In a statement, Press Association Editor-in-Chief praised the new tech, calling it a real game changer and making the following statement;
“Skilled human journalists will still be vital in the process,” he explained, “but Radar allows us to harness artificial intelligence to scale up to a volume of local stories that would be impossible to provide manually.” People will be involved in the curation and editing of the stories and, hopefully, help limit the possibility of accidentally publishing incorrect information in an era when “fake news” is an equally barbed insult on all sides of the political spectrum”
Only time will tell if programs like RADAR are the future of journalism, or if it will be able to remain a primarily human affair.
