Google has given £622,000 to the UK’s Press Association (PA) news agency for the group’s Reporters and Data and Robots (Radar) project. The project, which will launch in 2018, relies on artificial intelligence (AI) to write news articles. It will provide media outlets with up to 30,000 local news stories a month based on official open data sources.
Radar will also employ five humans to oversee the AI’s work. “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,” said PA editor Pete Clifton.