{"id":416,"date":"2015-02-06T09:56:34","date_gmt":"2015-02-06T08:56:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/joakimarhammar.se\/?p=416"},"modified":"2015-02-06T09:56:34","modified_gmt":"2015-02-06T08:56:34","slug":"why-we-love-robots-writing-content-and-you-should-too","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arhammar.se\/joakim\/index.php\/2015\/02\/06\/why-we-love-robots-writing-content-and-you-should-too\/","title":{"rendered":"Why we love robots writing content (and you should, too!)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Do you like the headline to this article? Yes? Well thank you! No? Don\u2019t blame me, because I actually didn\u2019t write it, Hubspot\u2019s robotic blog topic generator<\/a> did it for me. While that service is mostly for fun, there are other robotic content services that are really useful and can create full articles in no time.<\/strong><\/p>\n

A 15-year-old me doing robot work<\/strong><\/h2>\n

A good 15 years ago I worked extra as a sports editor at a local TV station. 95 percent of the content consisted of a Power Point slide with texts rolling over and over again (great, huh?). My job was to write game recaps, mostly about ice hockey and handball.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, the local tv station was not local at all to me, which meant that I couldn\u2019t watch most of the games that I was supposed to write about. All I could do was to look at the results and statistics from the games and base my texts on that.<\/p>\n

If one team shot a lot of pucks at the net without scoring, I would write: \u201cThe goaltender was put under a lot of pressure and turned out to be one of the MVPs of the evening by keeping the team in the game with some great saves.\u201d<\/p>\n

If one of the stars scored a goal, I could write: \u201cMr X continued his fine scoring streak. His reliability in front of the net will be a great weapon in the coming games against top opponents Team A and Team B.\u201d<\/p>\n

So why am I telling this story?<\/strong> Well, because this exact thing (writing articles based on data) is now being done by robots, but 100 times faster and more accurately. It\u2019s called robot journalism, or robotic content, and works best with data-rich stories such as finance stories, sports stories and breaking news.<\/p>\n

5 examples of robot journalism<\/strong><\/h2>\n
\"Photos<\/a>
Photos grabbed from Automatedinsights.com<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

1. Automated sport stories<\/strong><\/h3>\n

So I guess the first example has to be this – the service that would have made me unemployed had it been in place 15 years ago. StatSheet.com<\/a> is a network of sport sites with statistical comparisons, visualizations, and articles – all automated by robotic content. Here\u2019s the game recap from the 2015 Super Bowl final<\/a>.<\/p>\n

2. A robot writes 1,000 stories\/month for AP<\/strong><\/h3>\n

The most famous example of robotic writing is the Associated Press (AP) that has automatised their articles from companies\u2019 earnings reports. The company Automated Insights<\/a> has created an algorithm that transforms raw earnings data into a publishable AP story in a fraction of a second.\u00a0 AP can now produce 4,400 quarterly earnings stories, compared with only 300 such stories using their human journalists. The result is completely comparable with the work of a human. Take a look at this Q1 report from Apple<\/a> and judge for yourself.<\/p>\n

\"Auto-generated<\/a>
Auto-generated story by AP’s robot<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

3. 10,000 Wikipedia articles per day<\/strong><\/h3>\n

The swedish science teacher Sverker Johansson<\/a> has created a computer program called Lsjbot that has written a total of 2.7 million articles (and counting). His contributions account for 8.5 percent of the articles on Wikipedia.<\/p>\n

4. Narrative Google Analytics reports<\/strong><\/h3>\n

The company Narrative Science provides a service<\/a> that brings out statistics from your Google Analytics and creates a much easier read.<\/p>\n

\"Nice<\/a>
Nice looking report automatically created from Google Analytics numbers.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

5. Automated earthquake articles<\/strong><\/h3>\n

The Los Angeles Times has created a robot writer called Quakebot that can write a full article, complete with a map of the location, within minutes after the outburst, like this one for example<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"Nice<\/a>
Nice looking earthquake article there, robot.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Exciting future<\/strong><\/h2>\n

I don\u2019t need a robot to figure out that we\u2019ve only seen the start of these type of services. I\u2019ll leave you with a quote from Automated Insights\u2019 year in review blog post:<\/p>\n

\u201c2015 will also be the year that we redefine the possibilities of automated content\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m all ears.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Do you like the headline to this article? Yes? Well thank you! No? Don\u2019t blame me, because I actually didn\u2019t write it, Hubspot\u2019s robotic blog topic generator did it for me. While that service is mostly for fun, there are … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,9,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-416","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-content","category-journalistik","category-in-english"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arhammar.se\/joakim\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/416","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arhammar.se\/joakim\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arhammar.se\/joakim\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arhammar.se\/joakim\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arhammar.se\/joakim\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=416"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/arhammar.se\/joakim\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/416\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arhammar.se\/joakim\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arhammar.se\/joakim\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arhammar.se\/joakim\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}