Google Funds Job-Killing Initiative, Robot To Write News Instead Of People

In yet another example of technology replacing jobs in ways that no one would have expected, Google is funding a project that would allow a machine to write news instead of humans. In an age where journalists and writers struggle to make ends meet, the biggest search engine company in the world is contributing to their job loss.

For the moment, the initiative applies to local news in the UK, Recode recently reported. However, the company involved is the Press Association, which is a massive media brand in the country. With the $805,000 that the company was granted, a type of software could be created that can write up to 30,000 stories a month.

Google is providing the Press Association with the money via Digital News Initiative, which is basically a project that is aimed to fund news media innovations all across Europe. The media brand will be cooperating with Urbs Media, which is a startup specializing in automation software.

In a statement, the company was quick to assure that they would still be using human writers and journalists. Press Association’s editor-in-chief Peter Clifton stated that the new tool would simply enable the media firm to scale up the number of articles produced beyond what humans are capable of.

“Skilled human journalists will still be vital in the process,” Clifton said. “But Radar allows us to harness artificial intelligence to scale up to a volume of local stories that would be impossible to provide manually.”

For now, the industry is still unable to fully commit to using artificial intelligence to fully replace human writers due to the limitations that come with robot journalists. There are such things as nuance and flair to keep readers engaged. However, as Tech Crunch points out, machines are learning at a fast pace. It’s practically inevitable for human writers to be replaced by AIs.