And so it begins - robots are taking over journalism

Most people, when they hear "robot" still think of these things



Handy yokes they are, freeing us from heavy physical labour, increasing productivity and all that jazz ...all good.

But robots go beyond purely mechanical work aides and now they are infiltrating journalism.

Now you could say that journalism has gone to pot over the last years anyway, what with every loony on social media making it into the mainstream if they only shout often and loud enough.

But there still was a human somewhere with the selective brain and journalistic skill and training to weed out the worst.


Not any more:

Microsoft 'to replace journalists with robots'

The curating of stories from news organisations and selection of headlines and pictures for the MSN site is currently done by journalists.

Artificial intelligence will perform these news production tasks, sources told the Seattle Times .

https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/world-us-canada-52860247


And so it begins ... aggro bots are feeding fake news stories into the system by the ton and yet more bots will decide that they are good to go into the mainstream.

Soon enough Chinese whispers will be a more reliable news source than "the news" itself.