The Associated Press recently announced a big new hire: A robot reporter from Automated Insights (AI) would be employed to write up to 4,400 earnings report stories per quarter. Last year, that same automated writing software produced over 300 million stories — that’s some serious scale from a single algorithmic entity.

So what happens to media diversity in the face of massive automated content production platforms like the one Automated Insights created? Despite the fact that we’ve done pretty abysmally at incorporating a balance of minority and gender perspectives in the news media, I think we’d all like to believe that by including diverse perspectives in the reporting and editing of news we fly closer to the truth. A silver lining to the newspaper industry crash has been a profusion of smaller, more nimble media outlets, allowing for far more variability and diversity in the ideas that we’re exposed to.

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