And the Pulitzer goes to… a computer
Nobody wants to confront the idea of their own obsolescence. Still, sitting across a desk from Kris Hammond, in his office overlooking the lake shore in Chicago, it is hard not to at least have a sense of the inevitable. Hammond is the co-founder and chief scientist of a company called Narrative Science, which, among other things, has worked out a way of teaching machines how to write journalism. At the moment, the computers' output is limited to basic sports reports and business news. But Hammond is convinced this is only the beginning. It probably won't be that long, he half-suggests, before they can bash out 2,500 word stories on innovations in machine learning for the Observer New Review. Worse, he is irrepressibly cheerful about the prospect.
"Look!" he says, "we are humanising the machine and giving it the ability not only to look at data but, based on general ideas of what is important and a close understanding of who the audience is, we are giving it the tools to know how to tell us stories."
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