Source? If a major respected journalism outfit was using AI to generate stories I think that would be news itself, and I haven't heard it, outside of the corner-case of within-seconds earthquake reporting.
> The Associated Press has selected Data Skrive as its preferred platform for automated sports and gambling content. The increased breadth of content provides AP customers more inventory of local-focused sports and gambling news. The AP expects the expansion of content to help both small and large publishers attract new subscribers and grow audience.
> Roughly a third of the content published by Bloomberg News uses some form of automated technology. The system used by the company, Cyborg, is able to assist reporters in churning out thousands of articles on company earnings reports each quarter.
> The program can dissect a financial report the moment it appears and spit out an immediate news story that includes the most pertinent facts and figures. And unlike business reporters, who find working on that kind of thing a snooze, it does so without complaint.
> In addition to covering company earnings for Bloomberg, robot reporters have been prolific producers of articles on minor league baseball for The Associated Press, high school football for The Washington Post and earthquakes for The Los Angeles Times.
> Last week, The Guardian’s Australia edition published its first machine-assisted article, an account of annual political donations to the country’s political parties. And Forbes recently announced that it was testing a tool called Bertie to provide reporters with rough drafts and story templates.
From what I’ve seen of the tech, “assist” is the operant word here. It’s more like those article summary bots or a template fill-in-the-blank rather than something like GPT-2 that’s generating entirely novel phrases. A human still has to go in and make the text flow, correct things that don’t make sense, add good hooks, and (of course) an enticing title. The text isn’t “mostly written” by a bot - it’s still text that a human wrote, although it may have been summarized or had details populated by a bot.
That’s the sort of fill-in-the-blank thing I’m talking about. It does data ingest from a very structured source (sports scores, financial reports, weather) and populates a pre-written template. But… the article is dull as dirt (so you’d only use it as a starting point, or for relatively low-value content), and it only works for things with very structured data. This almost certainly isn’t the case with the OP article, or most reporting you read on a day-to-day basis.
None of this of course even remotely addresses the false (and, to any tech incined person who reads the BBC and has seen the state of AI-generated content) patently absurd claim you made that BBC News articles are "now mostly written by AI".
