Rise of the content bots

Robots are perfecting skills meant for factories and warehouses — but they’re targeting desk jobs, too. About 1/3 of the stories published on Bloomberg are written with some degree of AI help, reports NYT.

Between the lines: The articles that the Bloomberg bots write are standard wraps of company earnings reports — the stuff that business journalists might groan about.

In addition to markets news, another big area of bot reporting is sports. Per NYT, the AP uses AI for minor league baseball stories and the Washington Post for high school football recaps.

Here are examples of machine-generated articles from the AP:

• TYSONS CORNER, Va. — MicroStrategy Inc. (MSTR) on Tuesday reported fourth-quarter net income of $3.3 million, after reporting a loss in the same period a year earlier.
• MANCHESTER, N.H. — Jonathan Davis hit for the cycle, as the New Hampshire Fisher Cats topped the Portland Sea Dogs 10-3 on Tuesday.

Go deeper:

• The robot trust tightrope
• The overwhelming fakeness of today's internet
• Misinformation bots are smarter than we think