By MOJO REPORTERS

Despite the rise of robot journalism, humans will remain vital for quality and investigative work, journalist and academic Associate Professor Margaret Simons says.

Wherever networking, inside sources and off-the-record talks are needed to break news, reporters will be needed, she said.

"I don't really see this as a threat at all for investigative journalism. It might be effective for more surface-level or basic routine journalism such as financial, business or sport reports. 

"In terms of timing, robot journalism does make it easier to put out these more statistical stories out, but in terms of more deep-rooted journalism, robots are not quite there yet."

AI software is already prominent in fields where there are high amounts of input data – in particular sporting events, political polling and financial reports.

The Washington Post  reported last year that its AI bot, named Heliograph, had already published and tweeted 850 stories on its own, starting with reports on the Rio Olympics and moving on to minor political races and high school sports. 

Associated Press uses robot "writers” to  write earnings reports, and the company the Motley Fool said it expected up to 20 per cent of business content related to shareholder reports, legal documents, market reports, press releases to be generated by Ai this year.

These areas are considered highly time sensitive and competitive. The technology can quickly look at raw data and is able to figure out which parts are most important and interesting, and translate that into a narrative.

A/Prof Simons said when it came to investigative journalism, humans would beat artificial intelligence through their judgement skills, interaction with people and familiarity to the surroundings.

"No matter how advanced they are, robots won't be able to efficiently mimic these human journalistic skills."

Third-year journalism student Vanessa Hill said she wasn’t too worried about robots taking her place  in the newsroom.

“I’m not really worried as it doesn’t really seem feasible for computers to completely take over. They can’t really do interviews,” she said.

Ms Hill said she had reservations when it came to to bots' ability to fact check, but she hoped programs such BBC’s Juicer would help her once she enters the industry.

“I think it’s beneficial in that it frees up valuable time ... I honestly think it’s not going to impact my ability to get employment.”

The BBC site Juicer uses AI to compile data from a wide range of news sites, which humans can then use to create content, much faster than using conventional methods. 

Robot journalists can also help in detecting problems, as they are able to scan through stories and alert writers to potentially false information by detecting word patterns in stories, allowing writers to crack down on fake news.

Third-year journalism s student Xinyn Ji said he was concerned about how the industry would be affected by such technology.

“Yes it is worrying but I think robots will only be good at producing basic news stories,” he said.

“Maybe robots can report on news or sports events, but I don't think they can replace people in writing human interest stories.”

"Technology can be perfect, but it is always going to be cold, this is why humans are important in the media because they offer warmth."