You might be surprised to know that a good amount of what we read today is created by computer algorithms, and not humans. With the amount and speed of information that comes and goes daily over the Internet, we probably shouldn’t be all that surprised. There are many content areas demanding constant updating that no human could keep up with it. An emerging industry known as “automated narrative generation” uses algorithms and natural language generators to create written content for everything from financial earnings to merchandising to sports updates. Even some books are robo-written too. (Think you can spot the difference? Take this interactive quiz.)
As with most technology, there are pros and cons to this emerging field of automated narrative generation. Robo-journalism will give humans time to do more reporting and less data processing. Of course that also means that certain insights a human mind may impart could be missed when considering the same information, such as drawing connections and conclusions that aren’t necessarily obvious when just looking strictly at the data.