Diversity in the Robot Reporter Newsroom

The Associated Press recently announced a big new hire: A robot reporter from Automated Insights (AI) would be employed to write up to 4,400 earnings report stories per quarter. Last year, that same automated writing software produced over 300 million stories — that’s some serious scale from a single algorithmic entity.

So what happens to media diversity in the face of massive automated content production platforms like the one Automated Insights created? Despite the fact that we’ve done pretty abysmally at incorporating a balance of minority and gender perspectives in the news media, I think we’d all like to believe that by including diverse perspectives in the reporting and editing of news we fly closer to the truth. A silver lining to the newspaper industry crash has been a profusion of smaller, more nimble media outlets, allowing for far more variability and diversity in the ideas that we’re exposed to.

AI, Transparency, Gender BiasBrigitte BellanJuly 22, 2017algorithms, bots, Robots, computational journalism, Nick Diakopoulos

AI robots learning racism, sexism, and other prejudices from humans, study finds - The Independent

Artificially intelligent robots and devices are being taught to be racist, sexist and otherwise prejudiced by learning from humans, according to new research.

A massive study of millions of words online looked at how closely different terms were to each other in the text – the same way that automatic translators use “machine learning” to establish what language means.

Some of the results were stunning.

Prejudice, AI, Sexism, RacismBrigitte BellanJuly 2, 2017Independant, Robots, Machine Learning, Joanna Bryson, University of Bath, AI filters, European Union, Law