Digital Information Ecosystems

8 Are Robots and AI the Future of the Media?

In the fall of 2016, Komoroid and Otonaroid, two presenters in Japan, surprised their audience. Seemingly human and feminine, the two “journalists” were in fact robots who came to read the day’s headlines at a conference at the National Museum of Science and Technology in Tokyo. One of them even stammered. These two androids were installed in order to collect human reactions when faced with machines, not to replace a television presenter.

That being said, in early 2018, the robot Erica was presented as the next star of a TV news program in Japan. According to the Wall Street Journal (Bellini 2018), the 23-year-old metal-made journalist, as per her creator Iroshi Ishuguro, director of the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory in Osaka, should be the first robot on the news. Iroshi Ishuguro even believes that his robot, which can express simple emotions, will soon have an independent conscience.

These examples illustrate the advances in the field of journalistic robots in recent years.

8.1. Robot journalists are already in action

On July 1, 2014, the Associated Press (AP) used the Wordsmith¹ robot platform for the first time in order to write articles on companies’ quarterly financial results. Wordsmith then used the Zacks Investment database (Colford 2014). The AP explained that journalists had previously processed about 300 quarterly financial reports, but that the use of database processing and a robot could now allow 4,400 financial ...