Someday Afflictor will be published by an army of robot monkeys–I mean an even bigger army of robot monkeys–but until then you can read robo-produced pieces from the Associated Press. From Francie Diep at PopSci:

“Finance and sports are the usual targets of robot reporting. Both are a bit robotic by nature. The most basic reports involve plugging numbers from a database into one of a few standard narratives. That said, automatically written stories don’t have to be too terrible to read. One small, recent study even found human readers can’t always tell the difference between people- and algorithm-written sports stories.

The biggest argument for robot journalism is that it frees human reporters to do the kind of deeper reporting only people can do. That is likely true, and pretty cool. Another is that auto-writers are able to accurately process an inhuman amount of data, then present it in a way that humans like to see: in words. ProPublica did this last year for one of its interactive stories about public schools.”