In Praise of Robo-Journalism By Brian Simpson

     I welcome, in a near-nihilistic fashion, that the rise of robots will eliminate the jobs of many of our enemies. Take journalists for example; while this site would be hard-pressed to programme a robot to write the nonsense that I write, that is not so for mainstream journalism, which is essentially mechanical bs that would be perfectly replicable by a machine, since the people writing it now are no more than meat machines, soulless and evil:
  https://sg.news.yahoo.com/robo-journalism-gains-traction-shifting-media-landscape-014451181.html

“A text-generating "bot" nicknamed Tobi produced nearly 40,000 news stories about the results of the November 2018 elections in Switzerland for the media giant Tamedia -- in just five minutes. These kinds of artificial intelligence programs -- available for nearly a decade -- are becoming more widespread as news organizations turn to them to produce stories, personalize news delivery and in some cases sift through data to find important news. Tobi wrote on vote results for each of Switzerland's 2,222 municipalities, in both French and German, for the country's largest media group, according to a paper presented last month at the Computation + Journalism conference in Miami. A similar automated program called Heliograf has enabled The Washington Post daily to cover some 500 election races, along with local sports and business, since 2014. "We've seen a greater acceptance of the potential for artificial intelligence, or robo-journalism, in newsrooms around the world," said Damian Radcliffe, a University of Oregon professor who follows consumer trends and business models for journalism. "These systems can offer speed and accuracy and potentially support the realities of smaller newsrooms and the time pressures of journalists."

News organizations say the bots are not intended to displace human reporters or editors but rather to help free them from the most monotonous tasks, such as sports results and earnings reports. Jeremy Gilbert, director of strategic initiatives at The Washington Post, said Heliograf was developed as a tool to help the newspaper's editorial team. "The Post has an incredible team of reporters and editors and we didn't want to replace them," Gilbert told AFP. - 'Is this something we can automate?' Gilbert said the bot can deliver and update stories more quickly as they develop, allowing reporters to concentrate on other tasks, and that reaction has been generally positive. "The surprise was that a lot of people came up and said, 'I do this story every week; is this something we can automate?'" Gilbert said. "These weren't stories that anyone wanted to do."

Similar conversations are going on in newsrooms around the world. The Norwegian news agency NTB automated sports reports to get match results delivered within 30 seconds. The Los Angeles Times developed a "quakebot" that quickly distributes news articles on temblors in the region and also uses an automated system as part of its Homicide Report. The Associated Press has been automating quarterly earnings reports for some 3,000 listed companies, allowing the news agency to expand from what had been just a few hundred, and this year announced plans with its partner Automated Insights to deliver computer-generated previews of college basketball games. Rival news agency Reuters last year announced the launch of Lynx Insight, which uses automated data analysis to identify trends and anomalies and to suggest stories reporters should write. Bloomberg's computerized system called Cyborg "dissects a company's earnings the moment they appear" and produces within seconds a "mini-wrap with all the numbers and a lot of context," editor-in-chief John Micklethwait wrote last year, noting that one-fourth of the agency's content "has some degree of automation."

France's Le Monde and its partner Syllabs deployed a computer program that generated 150,000 web pages covering 36,000 municipalities in the 2015 elections. One advantage of using algorithmically generated stories is that they can also be "personalized," or delivered to the relevant localities, which can be useful for elections and sports coverage.”

     Well, kiss mainstream journalism goodbye. Certainly, the replacement of human jobs by AI is a concern, but not all of this is bad, since some of the rotters are going to lose their jobs, and need to go back to college, get massive student debt, learning programming, only to discover that AI machines program even better than humans! Who says that there are no happy endings?