Robots have always been synonymous with the future. From the Jetsons, to The Terminator, we have often thought of robots as the ultimate human creation. While robots aren’t wandering the streets yet, The Associated Press has revealed that it will work with the NCAA and Automated Insights to produce data-driven journalism created by robots.
Over the next 20 months, the AP will try this out with Division I baseball games first followed by Division I women’s basketball, Division II and Division III football, and Division I basketball. In referring to the partnership with the AP, Automated Insights CEO Robbie Allen said, “We are thrilled to advance data-driven journalism with such a forward-looking organization.”
Wordsmith, which is the Automated Insights technology at the center of these AP recaps, has already provided more than 1 billion articles in 2014 for many large companies including Yahoo, the Associated Press, and Comcast.
The Associated Press has started using this technology for some of its business reporting, which takes large amounts of data and turns it into a clear and readable story. Automated Insights’ technology will have a strong hold on college game recaps after this deal, which comes right before March Madness when everyone will be doing their due research to create their brackets.
Today, many of the largest and most popular sports websites in the United States, including ESPN, Yahoo, CBS Sports, Fox Sports, and Sports Illustrated, licenses college basketball recaps from the Associated Press. So come tournament time, you will likely be reading game recaps written by Automated Insights software.
On what this means for the Associated Press, Barry Bedlan, the Associated Press’ deputy director of sports products, said in a statement. “This will mean thousands of more stories on the AP wire, which will remain unmatched in the industry. Every college sports town will have some level of coverage.” It is important to note that the Associated Press said that this implementation of data-drive journalism is a way of filling gaps and that they are not trying to replace their human reporters with robots.
While this data-driven journalism seems to be cutting-edge, with new advancements come new challenges. Everybody involved at the AP and Automated Insights has to make sure that they are doing what they need to do to keep content production ethical and accurate. Pbs.com came out with an ethical checklist for robot-written articles that may give them and our readers a look at some of the difficulties that could come with a situation such as this. If a checklist like this can be followed responsibly, data-driven journalism could be a game changing move as it will fill many gaps within sports news coverage.