After a 4.4 magnitude quake shook Californians awake in the early hours of 17 March, the LA Times were the first to report the incident, mere minutes after it was announced by the U.S. Geological Survey. You might be thinking it sounds faster than humanly possible. Well, yes. It was written by Quakebot.

At the bottom of the article it reads: “… this post was created by an algorithm…” Quakebot is one of the algorithms employed by the LA Times to expedite news articles about earthquakes and homicides as soon as they occur. Quakebot autonomously collects information from alerts by U.S. Geological Survey, and plugs it into a pre-written template.  The algorithm’s article is then reviewed by a human editor before it gets published.

These algorithms are not intended to replace journalists (they aren’t at that stage yet) but report on incidents as soon as possible, and free up time for the journalists to investigate and report on other issues regarding the story worth mentioning, like damage caused by the quake.

To read more about these robots writing articles for the LA Times, click here.

[ Source : Slate ]