AI is already making inroads into journalism but could it win a Pulitzer?

From football reports to clickbait, programs are changing the way the news is created

Look closely at what many journalists write about artificial intelligence - from AlphaGo's triumph at the ancient Chinese board game Go to Microsoft's accidentally racist Twitter bot - and you might detect some smugness. Research by Oxford University has predicted that journalism is among the jobs least likely to be replaced by a machine in the near future. And yet, as Columbia University prepares to celebrate 100 years of the Pulitzer prize, intelligent robots will publish financial reports, sports commentaries, clickbait and myriad other articles formerly the preserve of trained journalists.

"A machine will win a Pulitzer one day," predicts Kris Hammond from Narrative Science, a company that specialises in "natural language generation". "We can tell the stories hidden in data."

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