News agency Reuters has launched Lynx Insight, an AI-powered tool designed to help its journalists create stories, in a move that could also have implications for content marketing.
The tool can analyse data, suggest story ideas, and even write some sentences. It has been trialled by dozens of journalists since the summer, and will now be rolled out across Reuters newsrooms.
Reuters said the aim was not to replace reporters but instead augment them with a digital data scientist and copywriting assistant.
Reg Chua, executive editor of editorial operations, data and innovation at Reuters, said: “The real value is using machines to do what they’re good at and then presenting that to humans — that’s the best of both worlds.”
Previously, Reuters has trained algorithms to write short data-centric articles based on sports results, earthquake warnings and financial results by scanning huge datasets. The new system will simply pass on its work to human editors for editing.
Other news organisations are also getting involved in AI copyrighting, which could be used in programmatic content marketing in then future.
The Washington Post has run hundreds of machine-written short snippets using its in-house robot reporter, Heliograf, while the Press Association is working with Urbs Media for natural-language generation for local news with a project called RADAR, or Reporters and Data and Robots.
In addition, the Associated Press has increased the number of companies it covers by an order of magnitude using automation.