News Bots and the takeover of journalism

     Robots achieving sentience, rampaging the offices of a media corporation. Turning out stories upon stories, increasing the public reliance, then it happens. A small mistake that someone finds that could plunge the world into chaos. This sound like a James Bond movie. Well in our case, it is very much real. These "News Bots" take small bits of information and turns them into stories. Chances are you have read one of these pieces about the 2016 Elections and the Rio Olympics. They have been a round for some years, Fox has been using them to recap some of their sporting events and Buzzfeed created Buzzbot for the Republican National Convention. 

Most of the journalists that I know feel this is a threat to them. Why? This takes the basics of what most journalists learned in university and distills it into a simple program. From there the robot can almost match the tone, skill, and length of the article perfectly. According to the Tow Center of Digital Journalism at Columbia University, they state one of the concerns of these newsbots is the quality of news they put out. Most research states that news written by humans tends to earn higher ratings than that written by bots. In other words, humans like to read pieces written by other humans.  Along with that, the journal Journalism Practice, describe what journalist need to do: "Instead of arguing that machine-written narratives are not journalism, journalists reconsider what journalism is and where it is heading."