Robot Reporters Are Very Real…and Could Eventually Kill Entry-Level Writing Jobs

If you’re a writer, or have someone close in the profession, you should be afraid of this one nine-letter word: Heliograf. The word is actually a name, and it refers to The Washington Post‘s most-productive writer. And while ‘writer’ usually means human fingers on a computer’s keyboard, Heliograf is purely computer, nothing else. These programs are known as robot reporters.

In August of 2016, The Washington Post experimented with Heliograf — a homegrown artificial intelligence writing system — to shore up their coverage of the Rio Olympics. Instead of recent graduates handling all the basic writing assignments, the data was retrieved and spit out by Heliograf.

Needless to say, it worked. From there, the automated storyteller took on a bigger workload. In the year after its initial release, Heliograf produced “around 850 articles” for the D.C. publication, per Digiday. Most of the capabilities of Heliograf revolve around numbers, so The Post used it mostly for election coverage and financial reporting.

But because of the focus on numbers, they also dabbled in lower-level sports (high school, etc.). Basically, they have it set up like a Mad Lib and when the box score comes out, it pumps out a boiler-plate game story.

Below is an excerpt taken from a Heliograf-written, high school football story from September 4th, 2017:

The Landon Bears shut out the visiting Whitman Vikings, 34-0, on Friday.

Landon opened the game with a 90-yard kickoff return for a score by Jelani Machen. Landon added to their lead on John Geppert’s five-yard touchdown run. The first quarter came to a close with Landon leading, 14-0.

In the second quarter, the Bears went even further ahead following Joey Epstein’s four-yard touchdown run. The Bears scored again on Geppert’s one-yard touchdown run.

Very basic, but perfectly fine coverage for high school sports. That is, however, the problem. This is pretty much what entry-level sports writers are responsible for, and it’s given to robot reporters.

Right now, it’s not effecting a ton of writers. That’s because the smaller papers can’t get their hands on the AI technology. One day, though, there will be an affordable version that’s readily available to all publications. When that happens, the already small number of sports writing positions will get trimmed down.

They’ll argue that robot reporters will give human writers more time to focus on bigger, more intellectual stories — which is true. That’s for existing employees, though, not folks out there looking. The Washington Post also made it seem like most AI-written stories wouldn’t have been assigned otherwise — which, again, is probably true. But “most” doesn’t mean “all”, and you can’t tell me that they’re just going to let high school sports go unreported. This technology will effect the young sports reporter more than anyone.

Luckily, Seth Lewis, a journalism professor who focuses on the rise of robot reporters, told Digiday that “we are many years away from these things being implemented at the local level.”

With how things are moving, I don’t know if I buy into that. Even Grammarly does stuff sometimes that blows my mind (like catching a misspelling of Nowitzki). I’d say we’re four or five years away from some trickle down locally. There’s just too many smart people out there making algorithms, looking to make a splash. Let’s just hope they don’t start replicating personality in reporting…then we’re all screwed.