A Carnegie Mellon research team specializing in human-computer interaction is conducting an experiment to see if they can create "an automated system for producing quality journalism using an army of untrained workers." Using the Amazon.com "Mechanical Turk" crowd-sourcing marketplace, the experiment, dubbed "My Boss Is A Robot," will attempt to produce a 500-word article on a newly-released scientific paper. An automated software system will use the unskilled workers on Mechanical Turk, assigning them tasks like reading the abstract and identifying the most interesting aspects. Hm, this all sounds very familiar...:
When it’s done, the workers, overseen by the software, will have selected the angle that the story will take. (Mechanical Turk is fast. This might happen in minutes). The rest of the process—writing, editing, fact-checking—will work in a similar way. So if it does actually work, the system will be totally automated. Meaning that we will feed a scientific paper into this human-powered machine and, a few days later, out will pop a piece of journalism.
More to come soon on exactly how we’re going to do this, the results from the first stages of the experiment, plus some thoughts on whether we should even be referring to the results as journalism.
Real journalists probably shouldn't feel threatened by this system yet, but if it's a success, entire editorial departments could be replaced by automated machines, with computer algorithms determining what's newsworthy and how the news should be packaged. And instead of paying a paltry sum to Mechanical Turk, the machines could easily get interns to do that grunt work for free!... Uh-oh—when you really think about it, this nightmarish endeavor sounds less like the journalism of the future and more like the blogging of the present. These machines must be stopped before they render human rebloggers obsolete! [Via PSFK]
