Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Did a robot write this article? No, but it could have. This isn’t the plot of a dystopian Philip K. Dick novel, but an emerging journalistic reality.

You may already have read material produced by a machine without even realising it. To adapt William Gibson, “the robo-journalism future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed.”

So how might this technology evolve? And as journalists, should we consider robo-journalists friends or foe?

The Associated Press (AP) revealed in January 2015 that it “is now automatically generating more than 3,000 stories about U.S. corporate earnings each quarter.” It noted that this represented “a tenfold increase over what AP reporters and editors created previously.”...