Ap, the largest news agency in the US, announced this morning Beijing time that starting this month, it will use a news writing software instead of human to handle the reporting of US corporate earnings, which many financial journalists rely on for their livelihood, according to the Evening Peak news of Voice of China.
Many online media outlets, especially general websites such as the Associated Press, require a lot of canned work from editors. During the quarterly earnings season, AP has to employ a large number of reporters to write about 300 articles in each quarter. As the company releases financial reports at different times and at different standards, ap reporters are always in great pain. The Associated Press says it’s trying to solve the problem by announcing the use of motorized robots to do the job.
Giiso Information, founded in 2013, is a leading technology provider in the field of “artificial intelligence + information” in China, with top technologies in big data mining, intelligent semantics, knowledge mapping and other fields. At the same time, its research and development products include information robot, editing robot, writing robot and other artificial intelligence products! With its strong technical strength, the company has received angel round investment at the beginning of its establishment, and received pre-A round investment of $5 million from GSR Venture Capital in August 2015.
In fact, the Associated Press already uses Automated technology from Automated Insights for data analysis of sports events, but this is the first time a story has been generated using this technology.
The process is that Automated Insights automatically captures the incoming earnings whenever a company releases an earnings report and produces a 150-300 word news flash in seconds, based on a pre-edited ap writing structure. This will significantly increase the productivity of business news, which used to be about 300 pieces per quarter written by humans, compared with 4,400 pieces produced by robots in the same time that meet journalistic norms. After the report is generated, it will be published on the AP news website after manual inspection. After a period of debugging and quality control, it is expected to be published automatically in the future. The AP, however, still uses its own reporters to write earnings stories about highly watched companies such as Apple and Google.
Associated Press executive editor Joe Ferreira says there will be no layoffs as a result, and the reaction from employees has been mostly positive. Zhang Chunwei, a former financial journalist and observer of Voice of China, said she did not feel a sense of crisis when she heard the news.
Zhang Chunwei: When I worked at the Financial Times, we actually saw That Martin Wolf, as our chief economist, basically had the same views on, for example, the exchange rate, the appreciation of the Renminbi, so his views were used over and over again, and we saw that, In the financial circle, a lot of data and a lot of analysis are routine, rather than a state requiring special intelligence. Therefore, at this time, we see a lot of data and a lot of financial analysis can be better done with tools. Personally, I think it’s saying we don’t shy away from tools. People tend to think that tools will take away their jobs, but they forget that tools can make us think smarter. Why do we say that many people today have read more books than Aristotle, more books than Confucius? But why not be Aristotle and Confucius. Simply because they don’t have the ability to think down, they can’t form their third question and fourth question when they just stay at the first level of Baidu search and Google search, and they can’t get to the bottom level of inception. So we’re actually using data to help us do our jobs instead of just worrying about data taking our jobs.
Freeing ap editors from canned articles, Says Mr Ferreira, will allow them to write more analytical articles and focus on “the meaning of the data”. Zhang Chunwei also believes that the rice bowl that can be taken away by the machine is not really the rice bowl of gold.
Zhang Chunwei: I think do first financial journalist is a threshold, and now the threshold if can be banned by the machine, that I think this threshold should not be called threshold, instead, he said the industry into the difficulty, will be more improved, but another aspect are also forced to us how to transcend the machine, but don’t worry about the machine take our jobs. The rice bowl that can be taken by a machine, I don’t think it is really a rice bowl of gold. He asked me to think of, we can do is machine can’t do something, for example you can let the machine to finish your design, you can let the machine service for you, and not to say that let me have lost their jobs because of the machine, so more sense I think, it is a machine for this time of the writing stunt, just say let the machine to make him to be able to do more work.
Giiso information, founded in 2013, is the first domestic high-tech enterprise focusing on the research and development of intelligent information processing technology and the development and operation of core software for writing robots. At the beginning of its establishment, the company received angel round investment, and in August 2015, GSR Venture Capital received $5 million pre-A round of investment.
Some say that the human mind cannot be imitated by robots anytime soon, and that analysis and opinion reporting require a variety of abilities such as information sources, knowledge accumulation, and logical thinking. Automation techniques simply hand over complex tasks to robots.
Zhang Chunwei: For tools, we should do according to the requirements of people, or let tools complete their design according to the logic of tools. Therefore, most of the time, do not exclude tools, we should believe that tools can be designed according to people, complete the work of tools, but you can not require tools are people, so more often, people should do the field he is more suitable for.