Robots are pretty cool and all, but when they start to blur the lines between what humans do well and what they are capable of, that’s when things start to become really interesting.

News agency Associated Press (AP), for example, is looking to employ a number of robots to start churning out business-related news articles.

No, AP isn’t thinking of eventually replacing their entire staff compliment with story-gathering robotic writers, but rather assist the current staff so that time can be freed up for them to do other articles. The robotic writers will mainly be tasked in generating the really boring stories, like annual financial reports and business earnings.

“If anything, we are doubling down on the journalism we will do around earnings reports and business coverage. Instead our journalists will focus on reporting and writing stories about what the numbers mean and what gets said in earnings calls on the day of the release, identifying trends and finding exclusive stories we can publish at the time of the earnings reports,” wrote AP Managing Editor Lou Ferrara in a Q&A.

Ferrara added that the robots will allow them to produce thousands of these articles every quarter, where they could only 300 reports if it were to be written manually by human staff members.

“Instead of providing 300 stories manually, we can provide up to 4,400 automatically for companies throughout the United States each quarter.”

AP has also invested in the company that makes the robots, Automated Insights.

“We flipped the standard content creation model on its head. The standard way of creating content is, ‘I hope a million people read this.’ Our model is the inverse of that. We want to create a million pieces of content with one individual reading each copy,” explained Automated Insights CEO Robbie Allen told Poynter.

[Source – Poynter, image – CC by 2.0/Mark Strozier]