AI penetrates China’s media sector as robot starts writing business reports

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Human writers free to pursue in-depth stories as machine takes over data-heavy templated content such as earnings reports

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The writing robot can create reports from data-heavy material such as stock market moves. Photo: AP

Phoenix Kwong

Published: 8:00pm, 8 Dec 2016Updated: 3:32pm, 9 Dec 2016

Artificial intelligence (AI) is penetrating China’s media industry as a “robot reporter” has started writing company results and economic data at a Shanghai-based financial news outlet, which is working to upgrade the programme to help human journalists write.

AI could write four kinds of business news including regular listed companies’ results and macro-economic data such as consumer price index and gross domestic product figures, China Business Network chief executive Zhou Jiangong said. The Shanghai-based firm runs a number of publications and news sites including newspaper China Business News, yicai.com and CBNweekly magazine.

“AI’s automated writing feature can also do brief news on celebrities’ comments on social media, as well as stock market opens and closes which are some routine stories we need every trading day,” Zhou said at the company’s conference to release internet consumption data in Beijing.

Uber displays a pilot model of its self-driving car which also uses artificial intelligence - but to navigate through traffic. Photo: AFP

The financial news outlet is 30-per cent owned by e-commerce giant Alibaba Group.

The programme, also known as a robot reporter, had been used for six months while the company was working to upgrade it to help journalists writing more in-depth stories, instead of some standardised report.