AI is already making inroads into journalism but could it win a Pulitzer?

Look closely at what many journalists write about artificial intelligence – from AlphaGo’s triumph at the ancient Chinese board game Go to Microsoft’s accidentally racist Twitter bot – and you might detect some smugness. Research by Oxford University has predicted that journalism is among the jobs least likely to be replaced by a machine in the near future. And yet, as Columbia University prepares to celebrate 100 years of the Pulitzer prize, intelligent robots will publish financial reports, sports commentaries, clickbait and myriad other articles formerly the preserve of trained journalists.

“A machine will win a Pulitzer one day,” predicts Kris Hammond from Narrative Science, a company that specialises in “natural language generation”. “We can tell the stories hidden in data.”

Recent advances mean that AI can now write readable, flowing copy, and churn out repetitive articles faster than the most caffeinated hack.

“With automation, we now follow and produce quarterly earnings reports for 4,000 companies,” says Justin Myers from Associated Press, the world’s first and thus far only automation editor. “Previously we covered 400.”

He insists that having robots handle the drudge work frees up journalists for higher-minded pursuits. “You can take a step back and tell me instead what you noticed, what was interesting, something personal.”

The wire service plans to launch football recaps later this year, joining the likes of Yahoo who report on Fantasy Football leagues using the same tech. Powering the coverage is Wordsmith, a program able to churn out thousands of reports almost instantly. Elsewhere the software has been applied to everything from obituaries to Game of Thrones: “It’s the year 299,” begins one report, “and we catch up with our dastardly group along the rippling waters of the Riverlands.” Automated Insights, the company behind it, “wrote” 1.5bn articles last year. With only 50 employees, it claims to be the largest producer of content in the world.

Wordsmith consults the data and makes the same decisions every journalist faces when filing copy, such as when has a team suffered a “thrashing” and not just a “loss”? In fact, Wordsmith is so good at instant punditry it’s moving into the hyperbolic world of politics. “One outlet wants us to report on polls as they come in, to give it a persona and see if people think it is a person or not,” says founder Robbie Allen.

Thomson Reuters also publishes machine-written articles, using its own in-house technology. One experimental next-gen engine was so impressive that, “in a blind taste test, the machines actually came out as more readable than the humans”, according to Reg Chua, who oversees innovation at the company.

Automated journalism isn’t just about volume, but also targeting. “If one of our customers is a paper in a small to medium-sized city, and they want reports on a major employer in their town, we now have something for them,” says Myers. Chua goes further: “For 150 or more years, news has focused on stories of the most interest to the most people. But now a financial report could include a paragraph telling you how your own portfolio is doing: ‘the market is up, but you are down, and if you hadn’t sold your IBM stocks last week you would be so much higher right now’.”

A different strain of hypertargetting can be seen in ultraspecific “clickbait” articles like “27 secrets only a chiropractor will know”, or “The 10 most Jeff moments in every Jeff’s life”. “You could replace the name Jeff with any name procedurally and it would still work,” says Lars Eidnes, a 29-year-old developer from Norway. “Clickbait is pretty formulaic.”

Eidnes’ Click-o-Tron website analysed 2m articles from the likes of BuzzFeed, Gawker and the Huffington Post, and now “guesses” new clickbait articles into existence. It’s a silly joke prone to gibberish, but the best examples have a nightmarish logic. “New President Is Hours Away From Royal Pregnancy”, says one headline. “Kim Kardashian’s Child is a Bear”, claims another. “I wanted to destroy clickbait,” Eidnes laughs.

Researchers are also trying to find ways to use AI to find stories that humans couldn’t. “Most natural language systems simply describe an event. But most journalism is not descriptive, it’s event-driven,” says David Caswell, a fellow at the Donald W Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri. “Things happen to people in different locations, and the core narrative structure is the cause and effect between those events.” To put it in old journalistic terms: who, what, where and when?

In Caswell’s system, Structured Stories, the “story” is not a story at all, but a network of information that can be assembled and read as copy, infographics or any other format, almost like musical notes. Any bank of information – from court reports to the weather – could eventually be plugged into a database of this kind. The potential for such systems is enormous.

“It’s complete speculation,” he says, “but if no one had detected the break-in at the Watergate Hotel, and in the election the committee to re-elect the president had used information they’d gleaned, an algorithm could look at the series of events and say ‘these people had secret knowledge somehow’.”

But what about Hammond’s prediction that a robot would someday win a Pulitzer? Myers “absolutely believes” a machine will win, “because it already did”. Bill Dedman won a Pulitzer for his investigation into racist mortgage lending – a computer-assisted story - way back in 1988.

Chua calls robo-Woodward and auto-Bernstein “a stretch” but does see potential. “I think it may well be that in the future a machine will win not so much for its written text, but by covering an important topic with five high quality articles and also 500,000 versions for different people.”

Imagine an article telling someone how local council cuts will affect their family, specifically, or how they personally are affected by a war happening in a different country. “I think the results might show up in the next couple of years,” Caswell agrees. “It’s something that could not be done by a human writer.”