Democracy Dies in Darkness

AI may be news reporting’s future. So far, it’s been an embarrassment.

As some news outlets experiment with automated journalism tools, the mistakes are many, and would get a human reporter fired

By
September 22, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EDT
(iStock)
6 min

In their short life as machine-generators of news stories, artificial intelligence programs have screwed up simple interest calculations, botched the chronology of Star Wars movies, and produced sports stories that appeared to contain little actual knowledge of sports.

The latest embarrassing bit of robots-gone-wild “reporting”: An obituary of a former NBA player described in the headline as “useless at 42.”