English | EN This post was written by an algorithm
Mar 19, 2014
Read this article that was published in the Los Angeles Times last Monday and be honest: would you say that this post was written by a robot?
“A shallow magnitude 4.7 earthquake was reported Monday morning five miles from Westwood, California, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The temblor occurred at 6:25 a.m. Pacific time at a depth of 5.0 miles.
According to the USGS, the epicenter was six miles from Beverly Hills, California, seven miles from Universal City, California, seven miles from Santa Monica, California and 348 miles from Sacramento, California. In the past ten days, there have been no earthquakes magnitude 3.0 and greater centered nearby.
This information comes from the USGS Earthquake Notification Service and this post was created by an algorithm written by the author.”
Ken Schwenke was the journalist, the author of the algorithm. He was able to publish only three minutes after the earthquake happened. The so called “Quakebot” that Schwenke developed isn’t the first journalist robot he worked on. He and his team also created a homocide-bot.
It leaves you with a lot of questions. Can robots become good fact-checkers too? Is the objective approach better than a human approach (knowing the a quake has a size of let’s say 3.5, it’s nothing to be too much worried about). Is the journalist who writes the algorithm the author of the article?
Final question: can a robot win the Pulitzer prize? Will robots be better in finding the facts, connect the dots and chase the story? In a Big Data driven world? Who knows.
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