Breaking news from our robot reporter

 While sympathising with newspaper reporters who feel besieged by unfeeling robots, I feel that robot reporters (can we call them roborters?) will bring to their profession a bias that will prove unacceptable to human readers. Instead of human-interest stories, we’ll get machine-interest stories.

Consider the following fictitious piece, firstly as a human reporter might have written it: 

“Vassily Vodkov, a Russian tourist, was killed in Pattaya on Thursday when his jet-ski crashed into a seawall. His grieving compatriots have repatriated his remains to his native Vladivostok. We extend our deepest condolences to the Russian community for this tragic loss.”

Now consider the version that might be written by a roborter:

“Jet-ski SK43321, a valued employee of Jet-skis R Us, was destroyed in Pattaya on Thursday when she crashed into a seawall. Her callous human employers consigned her shattered remains to the local dump by. We extend our deepest condolences to the jet-ski community for this tragic loss. A human passenger was also killed.”

You see? Human readers will always need human reporters to bring out the human element in any newspaper story.

Of course, they could always go online instead.

S Tsow