Google is funding a robot journalism project in which computers will write 30,000 stories a month for local media.
The Press Association (PA) news agency received £622,000 for its Reporters and Data and Robots (Radar) scheme.
Radar will benefit “established media outlets”, independent publishers and local bloggers, PA said. One expert said it was unlikely to replace traditional reporting, although the project, which launches in 2018, will also use human journalists.
“Skilled human journalists will still be vital in the process, but Radar allows us to harness artificial intelligence to scale up to a volume of local stories that would be impossible to provide manually,” said PA editor Pete Clifton.
He added that the news media was in need of “cost-effective” ways to produce local stories.
Robot journalists have already been caught out by fictitious information. Last month, an LA Times program published an alert about a magnitude 6.8 earthquake in California. It was dated 29 June 2025 and in fact related to an earthquake that took place 100 years earlier – the notification had been published erroneously by the US Geological Survey.
Source: BBC
What do you think? An admirable effort, or a recipe for disaster?
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