The Newsroom of the Future: RoboNews
Alex Vance takes a break from fighting zombies to bring you a national news update.
I have seen the future of my profession, and it does not include me. News at Seven looks like a personal unemployment campaign directed at me. From their site:
News At Seven is a system that automatically generates a virtual news show. Totally autonomous, it collects, parses, edits and organizes news stories and then passes the formatted content to an artificial anchor for presentation. Using the resources present on the web, the system goes beyond the straight text of the news stories to also retrieve relevant images and blogs with commentary on the topics to be presented.
A video game avatar delivers the news (interrupted once by an attacking zombie) and another black avatar, weirdly surrounded by suited clones, gives the blog reaction. The images can be a little off, like showing a map of the Middle East when talking about Darfur, or showing a bouncing and prancing Anna Nicole Smith for a story about her son's death. But not bad.
Robonews: Other Stories
Marketplace had a story on Wednesday about computers writing simple news stories. Also, there is a guy who hosts a night show like program in Halo 2 that I informed Andrea Seabrook about when she was the blogger back in April -- it the story from Wired that she hyperlinks to.
Robonews: 10,000 Monkeys
I suppose that when it comes to the bottom line, it's easier to maintain some servers than feed 10,000 monkeys. But I don't think the end product will be much better.
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