Imagine that you are in the year 2050.You want to know what is happening in the world, you need to get information about economical or medical topics. You enter a special Internet portal where you find all the information you need but none of this information was ever written by humans. The journalist was the computer: a special intelligent machine that searched the information and wrote the articles.
It’s not impossible to imagine it. In some cases it’s almost a fact right now. Thomson Financial, an information agency in Canada, tested for over one year a special computer program that is some kind of a virtual journalist. It writes short texts about economical subjects, for example the tables with prices of world’s markets. This computer program working autonomously can search information, edit it and then upload it to the Internet.
For many people this kind of journalism is very controversial, especially for traditional journalists, because in their opinions you can’t be sure that the information written by computers is correct. However, these computer programs might be the chance to cut costs for many publishers. Computers can work 24 hours a day without breaks. They are also much faster than humans and can do several tasks at the same time. For example, the program used by Thomson Financial can write almost 1000 articles per day, each one in only 0,3 seconds.
On the Internet we can find other examples that may prove that computer journalism is not so far away in the future. Right now, many companies use special programs called spyboots. These programs hack computers connected to the internet, to search for information about users. After that, other programs use this data to send people personalized advertisements.
Maybe this kind of situation will occur in the future with articles and news items. Computers will be journalists, and they will send us personalized information about the things in which we are interested.
By: Sebastian Lucinski (Poland)
