AI

 I sat last night and watched a segment on German PhD computer engineers working on Artificial Intelligence (AI), and basically teaching a system to 'think'.  Their angle?  They wanted to teach a system to recognize 'fake news'.  

So they were at a point where the computer was responding back and now asking questions to the engineer.  

The engineer would suggest 'x' was real news, and 'y' was fake news.  Basically, the questions came back....'WHY'.

The computer, if you go and think about it....was trying to build a logical 'math-like' statement.  If you filter in ten bits of information....there should be a sensible math assignment here where x-number of facts are fake....thus rendering the news item 'fake'.

The more I saw....the more I was amused.

At some point, AI will read each single line of a news item, and then value it.  The line might contain one fact, which the AI draws three math sequences.....one being positive....one neutral....and one negative.  It'll eventually trust one above the other two, then move to the second line of news.  

Because of computer speed....you might be able to read through a sixty-line news piece and eventually reach a point where the forty sentences are each assigned a score (within 3 seconds).  So it might come to value a story as being mostly 'fake', when the human might score it as perfectly legit.  

What if you reversed the situation, and asked AI to write the news story?  I would imagine that it'd review the whole situation...where a human would write a 40-line story (either fake or true), but the AI would write a 5-line story.....just the facts, with no slant or agenda.  In this 'world', you might end up with a four-page newspaper (instead of twenty pages), or a newscast of six minutes instead of 30 minutes.

Somewhere down the line....maybe even in five years....I suspect some newscast or newspaper will exist....with only AI writing or producing it.  Competition against CNN, Fox or the WaPo?  Obviously.

The question is....would we go and procure this news ahead of everyone else, and just dump slanted news entirely?  

There's a bold new era coming....probably within a decade, and a number of news people are going to reformate their resume, because AI assumed the majority of jobs.