Computers Are Writing the News, and Consumers Can’t Tell the Difference
(Ga.) If today’s print newspapers don’t make money, maybe tomorrow’s will – by employing computer programs to replace human reporters.
CW Henderson is president and founder of NewsRX, an Atlanta-based software firm specializing in the use of artificial intelligence to deliver news content, said the software developed by his company is so good, there’s no reason any media company should employ humans based on the experience with several clients.
“You cannot tell that they are not written by humans,” he said in a statement January 27. “We just let people believe what they want. And most people, until the last year or two, have thought that our articles were always written by humans, and they have not been.”
NewsRX claims to produce 30,000 articles weekly from its news writing programs – stories that have been downloaded and read by over a billion readers worldwide.
According to the company website, Henderson served as a contract reporter for the Center for Disease Control and Prevention in the mid-1980s and sometime within the next decade began writing an artificial intelligence software that “automates every aspect of publishing, from writing and editing to design, layout, distribution, and analytics .”
In an interview published by D.C.-based EIN Newsdesk, Henderson said his program can mirror the skills of any human journalist.
“The AI is the same as a human in terms of writing our news articles, and it's because we were willing to write the code that was required, and of course over the last couple of decades you have to keep writing code and keep revising code because the world changes,” he said.