Artificial Intelligence and Journalism

In the fantasies of Hollywood, artificial intelligence (AI) is often portrayed in exaggerated ways. Software agents converse naturally with people. Robots navigate complex environments. People [Page 115]fall in love with their AIs. And it generally makes for great entertainment. But the reality of AI is far from the idealized depictions seen in the media. Formally, artificial intelligence can be defined as a computer system able to perform a task normally requiring human intelligence. The current state-of-the-art in AI is typically limited to functioning in narrowly defined, well-engineered applications with lots of high-quality data. Modern AI often relies on machine learning, a technique that allows computers to learn patterns from data and then perform tasks based on those learned patterns. For instance, a system might use ...