Google gives journalists money to use artificial intelligence in reporting – The Hill

Google is giving British journalists more than 700,000 pounds to help them incorporate artificial intelligence into their work.

Google awarded thegrantto The Press Association (PA), the national news agency for the United Kingdom and Ireland, and Urbs Media, a data driven news startup. It's one of the largest grants handed out by Googles Digital News Initiative Innovation Fund.

The funding, announced on Thursday, will specifically go to Reporters And Data And Robots, a news service that aims to create 30,000 local stories a month.

Skilled human journalists will still be vital in the process, but RADAR allows us to harness artificial intelligence to scale up to a volume of local stories that would be impossible to provide manually, Clifton said in a statement.

The news organizations expressed optimism for development of their AI tools with the new grant.

PA and Urbs Media are developing an end-to-end workflow to generate this large volume of news for local publishers across the UK and Ireland, they said in a release.

The funds will also help develop capabilities to auto-generate graphics and video to add to text-based stories, as well as related pictures. PAs distribution platforms will also be enhanced to make sure that all local outlets can find and use the large volume of localised news stories.

PA and Urbss AI push is not the first time mediaoutlets have taken advantage of the technology to supplement their reporting. Reporters at the Los Angeles Times have been working with AI since 2014 to assist them in writing and reporting stories about earthquakes.

"It saves people a lot of time, and for certain types of stories, it gets the information out there in usually about as good a way as anybody else would, then-Los AngelesTimes journalist Ken Schwencke, who wrote a program for automated earthquake reporting, told the BBC.

"The way I see it is, it doesn't eliminate anybody's job as much as it makes everybody's job more interesting."

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Google gives journalists money to use artificial intelligence in reporting - The Hill