This preceding Monday , the Los Angeles Times was the first medium sales outlet to report on the 4.7 magnitude tremblor that chance on the region . Incredibly , it was n’t a man who drop a line the postal service — but an automate organization pre - programmed for the chore .
This “ robo - diary keeper ” — called Quakebot — was develop a small over two year ago by Ken Schwencke , a journalist and coder for the LAT .
It works like this : Whenever an alert comes in from the U.S. Geological Survey about a earthquake above a certain intensity , it pulls the require information from the report and plug it into a template . Quakebot then sends it to the LAT ’s content management organization where it awaits approval by a human editor in chief — in this sheath , Schwencke , who published the article under his byline .
Here ’s the article in all its automated , dispassionate glory :
A shallow order of magnitude 4.7 quake was reported Monday daybreak five stat mi from Westwood , California , consort to the U.S. Geological Survey . The quake fall out at 6:25 a.m. Pacific time at a depth of 5.0 miles .
accord to the USGS , the epicenter was six mile from Beverly Hills , California , seven Admiralty mile from Universal City , California , seven international nautical mile from Santa Monica , California and 348 miles from Sacramento , California . In the past ten days , there have been no quake magnitude 3.0 and greater concentrate on nearby .
This information come from the USGS Earthquake Notification Service and this post was create by an algorithm spell by the author .
Read more about Southern California earthquakes .
So , from the second of the temblor to the clip of publishing , only three min had elapse . Wow .
Over at Slate , Wil Oremusconsiders the potential difference — or lack therefrom — for this futurist brand of news media :
Robo - news media is often hype as a menace to journalists ’ job . Schwencke does n’t see it that way . “ The way we habituate it , it ’s subsidiary . It saves people a lot of sentence , and for certain types of stories , it get the information out there in usually about as good a way as anybody else would . The path I see it is , it does n’t decimate anybody ’s job as much as it throw everybody ’s job more interesting . ”
Having spend some years as a local intelligence newsman , I can bear witness that slapping together brief , actual accounts of thing like homicides , earthquakes , and fire is essentially a game of Mad Libs that might as well be done by a machine . If nothing else , a bot seems potential to save beleaguered scribe from purge the thesaurus for equivalent word for “ blaze . ” ( Lacking an ego , Quakebot does not bear on itself with elegant magnetic variation . ) And in the showcase of earthquakes , an algorithm may in reality be best at judging the newsworthiness of a peculiar small earthquake than your mean gumshoe newsman or editor . Quakebot cognize , for illustration , that a magnitude less than 3.0 means it ’s probably not worth freaking out about , a lesson that over - eager wire reporters do n’t always grasp .
At the same sentence , Quakebot neatly illustrate the present limitation of automated journalism . It ca n’t assess the damage on the ground , ca n’t interview expert , and ca n’t discern the relative newsworthiness of various aspects of the story . Schwencke observe that it sometimes return a report based on a fictive warning signal or glitch in the USGS system . ( Like many of its human counterpart , Quakebot does n’t double - check its facts before bring out . ) And this might be nitpick , but only the densest of sentient journalists would see set to include the detail that the epicenter of Monday ’s shaking was “ 348 naut mi from Sacramento , California . ”
More atSlate .
take down : This clause was indite by a human being .
EarthquakesFuturismRobotsScience
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