Published in News

CIA invests in robot writers

by on07 June 2013

Better than journalists

It is starting to look like the days of news writers might be over. The CIA says that it has spent a small fortune on software which can look at all the facts and write reports on them.

The CIA's venture capital wing, In-Q-Tel, has invested an unknown amount in a company called Narrative Science, which codes software capable of turning massive data sets into easy-to-read written prose. Narrative Science got its start by turning baseball box scores into readable accounts of games. This is not difficult as most sports writers do not actually speak any official language.

But now it seems the software has become cleverer and now Narrative Science finds most of its clients in the financial services, marketing and research fields. The CIA collects mounds of raw data, and its researchers would most likely appreciate an automated hand in turning all those figures into readable, actionable reports for agents and higher-ups.

Steve Bowsher, Managing Partner at IQT, in a press release tjat he thinks that advanced analytic capabilities can be of great value to our customers in the Intelligence Community. Of course anything they write will still be slagged off by readers in comments sections.

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