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The Guardian reports:
Robots will help a national news agency to create up to 30,000 local news stories a month, with the help of human journalists and funded by a Google grant. The Press Association has won a €706,000 (£621,000) grant to run a news service with computers writing localised news stories.
The national news agency, which supplies copy to news outlets in the UK and Ireland, has teamed up with data-driven news start-up Urbs Media for the project, which aims to create “a stream of compelling local stories for hundreds of media outlets”.
Journalists will find stories in national open databases from sources including government departments, local councils and NHS trusts, and make “detailed story templates” for topics such as crime, health and employment. Multiple versions of the story will be created with Natural Language Software and will “scale up the mass localisation of news content”.
More from Engadget:
AI has been used in newsrooms in the past, but it isn’t without its faults. Tests have shown that despite being faster than humans, computers can come up short in terms of writing style and readability. And, in most cases, some level of human oversight is required.
Radar is no different. The project will depend on human writers to choose the stories (on topics such as crime, health, and employment) that the AI will then write. The computers will also auto-generate graphics, video, and pictures to match the articles.
Although it may not be groundbreaking, the PA believes Radar will provide a boost to local news outlets at a difficult time. Regional news providers are struggling with shrinking budgets, while interest in localized news remains just as high. Automating articles on a mass scale is seen as a practical way of meeting that demand.