Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Amanda Stent, a natural language processing researcher at Bloomberg, said data scientists want to work with journalists to create mutually-beneficial solutions. “I see the newsroom working with data science to create very forward looking, fast and accurate journalism, both text and multimedia,” she said. “I think it’s incredibly exciting and really helps people who are consumers of media to make better decisions and be better informed.”

John Borthwick, the CEO of Betaworks, said that humans need to begin to discuss the ethical implications of machine learning and to understand how machines interact with human experiences. “Our sense as human beings that we have this ability to be able to do things that machines can’t do is going to be challenged, and we need to start thinking about this,” he said.

Borthwick pointed to the fact that political bots had a significant impact on how Americans thought about the 2016 presidential candidates and how they voted.

When Twitter user Rory Cellan-Jones asked Google Home if Barack Obama is planning a coup, the digital assistant device responded by detailing a bogus conspiracy theory about the former president plotting a communist scheme to take over the government. 

"According to details exposed in Western Centre for Journalism's exclusive video, not only could Obama be in bed with the communist Chinese, but Obama may in fact be planning a communist coup d'état at the end of his term in 2016," the smart home device's robotic voice explained, though it stumbled over the word "d'etat."

But this outlandish response isn't restricted to Google Home. Rather, it highlights a problem with how the search engine responds to queries in the form of "featured snippets" — short, direct answers highlighted at the top of its search results....