The concepts in my final digital artefacts and original ideas are not much different. At the time, I made some changes to my plan based on feedback from my tutor and my peers after the first DA project presentation, from researching artificial intelligence announcers to studying and writing robots.
Machine writing dates back to the 1950s. The machine was just used to translate and study the text at that time. Until the 1970s, the expansion of computer technology applications led to the study of machine writing in other fields, such as using machine writing to generate description texts in games, and scholars began to try to create isolated sentences. In the 1980s, machine writing technology was developed by leaps and bounds, and gradually applied to the generation of paragraphs and chapters. With the development of advanced technology, by the beginning of the 21st century, machine writing technology is mature, and many fields have begun to independently develop and use robot writing systems including the news industry (Li et al. 2018). From a world perspective, the widespread use of writing robots has led to the development of journalism around the world. According to the US Geological Survey (USGS), the Los Angeles Times has been automated writing report since the earthquake in 2014. An agency in the Netherlands uses an intelligent algorithm to write simple language stories for children’s news lines. Tencent, the Chinese technology giant, has demonstrated a system that can automatically write about voice reports. The Chinese national news agency, Xinhua News Agency, is also increasing the use of artificial intelligence in the workplace (Baraniuk 2018). My methodology is mainly based on a large amount of reading news and academic articles. I didn’t do the survey because I think there are many limitations to this type of survey. For example, the options are very rigid. This does not apply to the ideas of each participant.
Moreover, the problems I studied were more esoteric, so I chose to summarize the opinions published by the experts in the media area on the Internet about writing robots and intelligent algorithm writing. Fanta (2017) said in the article that today’s news automation is not automated. Such applications suffer from many drawbacks such as limited data access, inadequate technology, and different cultural restrictions in newsrooms. So he believes that in the future, the development of writing robots should focus on improving the ability of intelligent systems to generate data and the ability to make natural language automatically.
I think the strong point of this project is that through the research we know that the future news industry will still have jobs for media students, and We don’t have to panic for future replacements with robots. The limitation of the investigation is that it is now in the period when artificial intelligence is just beginning to develop, and many things are unpredictable. And for my entire work, the scope of the study is narrow. Because I only focus on human editing will not be replaced, but there are still many positions in the news industry to be studied.
Reference:
1. 李凌云、闫敏、任皓：《新闻自动写作若干技术研究》，人民网，2018年2月12日
Li, L. Yan, M. & Ren, H. 2018,’ Research on Several Techniques of News Automatic Writing’, People’s Daily Online, 12 February, accessed 4 June 2019,
2. Baraniuk, C. 2018, ‘Would you care if this feature had been written by a robot?’, BBC News, 30 January, accessed 6 June 2019,
3. Alexander, F. (2017), ‘Putting Europe’s Robots on the Map: Automated journalism in news agencies’, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, pp.1-21
