Beijing: A first business report written by a robot has been published in China this week, stoking fears among local journalists that it could make forays into the country's state-controlled media and threaten their jobs.
Chinese social and gaming giant Tencent released its flawless 916-word article via the company's QQ.com portal, an instant messaging service that wields much sway in China, the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post reported on Friday.
"The piece is very readable. I can't even tell it wasn't written by a person," Li Wei, a reporter was quoted as saying by the Post.
It was written in Chinese and completed in just one minute by Dreamwriter, a Tencent-designed robot journalist that apparently has few problems covering basic financial news.
The subject of Thursday's robot-written article was China's August consumer price index. The article even quoted analysts on the economic prospects of China, which is experiencing a slowdown after decades of high growth.
"I've heard about robot reporters for a long time, but thought they only operated in the United States and Europe,"
Li said adding that "I'm not ready to compete with them yet." More worryingly for local Chinese reporters, the threat to their careers may dwarf the one faced by their peers in other countries.
"Generating news stories in plain language following a certain template is not difficult for computers," said Wu Dekai, a former associate professor at Hong Kong University.
"There is no reason why we can't do it in Chinese as well," Wu said. The software powering the robots that write these stories uses algorithms designed to collate data, find patterns and pull quotes from sources by sifting through reams of material, including that found online.
The robot workers take no holidays, miss no deadlines and produce clean, well researched copy for as little as USD 7 an article in the US.
On top of that, the algorithms that power these machines are designed to catch errors and learn from their mistakes, the report said.
