Robot Reporters and Automated Anchors

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October 10, 2010

Hey, here’s something terrifying:

To fill the void of the massive layoffs that have hit journalism, it appears that news outlets may be looking more and more to computers and even artificial intelligence to fill the void.

Among the things computers can do that humans used to are wedding announcements, sports articles, basic financial reporting, and even laying out the page.

But for some reason the scariest of these is automated news anchors. It’s not like most news anchors don’t already look like plastic humans, but seriously. Are they trying to make things worse?

Just to prepare you for the coming dystopia, here’s an automated movie review of Taken.

BSKY

Seth Fischer

Seth Fischerâ€™s writing has twice been listed as notable in The Best American Essays and has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize by several publications, including Guernica. He was the founding Sunday editor at The Rumpus and is the current nonfiction editor at The Nervous Breakdown. He is a Dornsife PhD Fellow at USC and been awarded fellowships and residencies by Ucross, Lambda Literary, Jentel, Ragdale, and elsewhere, and he teaches at the UCLA-Extension Writerâ€™s Program and Antioch University, where he received his MFA.