The Rise of the Machines

Two weeks ago, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong sat onstage at a conference in New York and boasted that his company was hiring reporters: "Can you imagine that," he joked to the crowd. After a year of endless layoffs and magazine and newspaper closures, AOL is hiring—reporters?! Hilarious!

Those reporters had better be robots. Today comes the news, via the Wall Street Journal's Emily Steel, that Armstrong is spearheading an effort to automate more news coverage on AOL.

Writes Steel: "AOL is betting it can reinvent itself with a numbers-driven approach to developing content, based on what Web-search and other data tell, it is most likely to attract audiences and sponsors…. In December, when it becomes a stand-alone company, AOL will begin to tap a new digital-newsroom system that uses a series of algorithms to predict the types of stories, videos, and photos that will be most popular with consumers and marketers."

In other words, Armstrong is employing more bots. Imagine that.

The most alarming part of this Rube Goldberg news machine is the way it obviates editors: Steel describes AOL's system, which will include "a series of filters to scan for plagiarism, obscenities, grammar, and punctuation, and will be tagged with other information. It will then be assigned to an editor to be fact-checked, edited, and published online."

Maybe you're starting to feel a little déjà vu at this description of a world without editors. When Google unleashed Google News in 2002, one of its selling points was the absence of a human editors with their mortal biases, mistakes, and, you know, news judgment. Some were concerned, like the San Francisco Chronicle's C.W. Nevius, who praised the news aggregator's wide reach in 2002, but worried, "How would we decide which is most relevant? We need a human with good judgment. That's the job description for a good editor."

There were also boosters like CNet's Larry Dignan, who wrote that same year, "I'd argue that the Google News page has better news judgment than most. It's certainly more interesting, drawn from 4,000 sources or so…. Google News also tends to be more global, a trait that can be sorely lacking elsewhere. On one visit, the two top stories were from the Jerusalem Post and the BBC. I reloaded a few minutes later, and the lead article was a story from Saudi Arabia's English daily Arab News. The Ithaca Journal also got a plug. Simply put, Google combines mainstream media and the Utne Reader all in one place."

Or, put another way, Google News obliterates the context in which a story was reported—Does anyone really think the BBC and the Ithaca Journal are the same?—and gives readers a mishmash of "content." As recently as September, according to Tech Crunch's Michael Arrington, Google News' highly skilled bots thought a story from The Onion was a real story: A human (at least one with a sense of humor) would've caught that. (It's worth mentioning that Armstrong came to AOL from Google earlier this year.)

Journalists sometimes self-effacingly refer to their business as a "sausage factory," since we all eat it, but no one really wants to know what goes into making it. When it's compiled by algorithms and "a series of filters," you're not even getting sausage: You're getting scrapple, bits of pork and grizzle thrown together without concern for quality or flavor.

Does it fill your belly—or the bottomless belly of the 24-7 news beast? Of course.

Is it good for you? Apparently, you don't care.