Abstract: Technological innovation often liberates human hands to a large extent, and the news industry with The Times also hopes to ride the express train of artificial intelligence, so "writing robot" arises at the historic moment. However, the development of artificial intelligence technology has always been the focus of our attention on the replacement of labor force or the reconstruction of the industry. Therefore, the introduction of robots into journalism has aroused a sense of panic among both Chinese and Western journalists, which has led to the "journalist's disengagement theory". But it is the imperfection of technology that makes it so innovative, and so does the writing robot. Let writing robots and journalists develop their strengths, and journalism will have a more brilliant future.
Key words: artificial intelligence; Writing robot; Reporter's disrespect
CLC number: G21 Document Code: A Article Number: 1672-8122 (2017) 05-0044-02
November 7, 2015 is the 84th birthday of Xinhua News Agency. The icing on the cake is that on this day, the robot "Kuaibi Xiaoxin" put into the news writing work for the first time. Although it is not the first one in the world, it is the first robot writing in China. The news that the robot "Fast pen small new" takes up the post has just been released, causing great response from netizens. "Robots are taking journalists' jobs!" "Small make up cry dizzy in the toilet" "robot came, where the reporter to go"... It seems that the emergence of robots is the "end of the world" for journalists. But can robots really replace journalists?
I. The emergence and development status of "writing robot"
"Writing robot", the full name is "automated news writing robot", as the name suggests, is an automated news writing software, using algorithm program, from the massive database to collect all kinds of subject matter data, establish the connection between the data, so as to form the content of the report. Although there is no clear time limit so far, most scholars believe that since the 1950s, writing robots have started to "enter" the American journalism industry. With its advantages of fast big data information search and processing technology, writing robots have caused panic among journalists and led to the "theory of journalist's silence". Consider the development of "writing robots" in the past decade: In 2006, Thomson Financial used a computer program to automatically write economic and financial news. In 2009, Northwestern University developed a software program called Stats Monkey that automatically extracts college baseball data from web pages and generates a news report within 12 seconds. The software's business prospects were quickly discovered in 2010 by two Northwestern university professors and a former web company executive who co-founded Narrative Science. The company then developed a system called Quill, whose initial customers were one of the top 10 sports-centric leagues in the United States. Since 2010, Quill has written thousands of sports stories for the Top 10 leagues. Quill reports almost in real time during the games, and its articles are far more numerous and timely than any previous writing software. In addition, AP began to use robots to write financial and economic reports in July 2014, mainly short news about emergencies and company performance.
But originally from 1967 the Detroit free press reporter Philip meyer in view of the city's riots, use a large computer analysis reports, to the 2016 Olympics in Rio in the Washington post, dare to innovation, using robots reporters and traditional reporters to news reports, more Wordsmith used by the ap platform, makes the general public to experience the man-machine interactive "semi-automatic" news writing experience, etc. These are examples of how "robo-journalists" have flourished in the western media industry.
Compared with the West, domestic media using robots to write articles is new, and Tencent is "the first to eat crab". On September 10, 2015, Tencent Finance released an article written by the writing robot "Dream Writer" -- CPI in August reached a 12-month high of 2.0% year-on-year. And in the September 3 "big military parade", CCTV USES "Sky eagle" "flying cat" and other intelligent equipment, to the parade site spectacular scene for filming, the effect is also let the common people profuse praise; Xinhua news Agency was not far behind. On November 7, the robot "Kuaibi Xiaoxin" was unveiled, mainly responsible for writing reports on finance and sports. For another example, the 'Xiao Ming Bot', which was jointly developed by Toutiao and Peking University, showed its skills in last year's Rio Olympic Games, with a total publication volume of over 450 articles [2].
From robot skillfully using the advantage of big data information technology we can not help but sigh, came up with the robot "writing" is a milestone on journalism and the effect of "five w" the work of each link in the robot mode has the corresponding change, including the news information sources to expand, the production of man-machine shift, the speed of news production increased, the news production process simplified and diverse news content and style.
Of course, robots can produce more than just the shallow types of stories listed above. In the latest phase of robotics, "writing robots" have been able to do a bit of in-depth news tracking, writing, reporting and so on, which makes journalists' sense of panic understandable.