Did you know Forbes actually publishes computer generated stories? (Forbes article written by robot journalists) When I first found this out, I was astonished by how much technology can do for us today. Narrative Science is one of the lead companies that develops automated journalism software—the robot journalists. “Robot Journalists”, as the name implies, it is a software that automatically generate news articles. According to the Evgeny Morozov (“A Robot Stole My Pulitzer” by Evgeny Morozov), this software are mostly applied in sports, finance, and real estate field. The reason is because these articles usually follow the same pattern and require lots of statistical analysis. Especially, these are the fields that require fast real time information, and robot journalists can easily achieve that. These robot journalists can save much more time and money for the publisher. Although it is artificial intelligence, the quality of the articles written by robot journalists even exceeds the ones written by professional journalists because machines make less errors than human. According to Mr. Morozov, they even can incorporate mostpopular and recent quotes from Twitter.

Despite of all the benefits robot journalists may bring, this technology scares me. When I first read the article generated by robot journalists, except the author’s name was Narrative Science, I did not realize any difference from an article written by a real journalist. Somehow, I felt I was fooled. I found myself real uncomfortable reading a robot written article. Part of the truth might be it was hard for me to admit artificial intelligence could take over human intelligence. At the same time, there are other ethical issues arose, such as the unemployment of professional journalists. Will robot journalists be able to take over real journalists one day? How do you feel about reading an article generated by a machine?