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 .
Norwegian news agency NTB automated sports reports to get match results delivered within 30 seconds.
France's Le Monde and its partner Syllabs deployed a computer program that generated 150,000 webpages covering 36,000 municipalities in the 2015 elections.
Broussard said there were many positive applications of AI in the newsroom, but that for now, most programs handled "the most boring" stories.
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