Job of the Day: Olympic Reporter

But only if you’re a robot.

Today in “robots doing people jobs,” we have a story from—and about— the Washington Post. I’ll let Recode start us off:

The Washington Post will use robots to write stories about the Rio Olympics

The Post is using homegrown software to automatically produce hundreds of real-time news reports about the Olympics. Starting tomorrow morning, those items will appear, without human intervention, on the Post’s website, as well as in outside channels like its Twitter account.

I love the term “homegrown software.” It’s like saying “the robots are okay, because we made them ourselves, artisanally, in our backyard.”

This particular software is named Heliograf, and it’s tweeting all by itself at @wpolympicsbot.

Niccolo Campriani #ITA wins shooting gold in men’s 10m air rifle, beating Serhiy Kulish #UKR.

 — @wpolympicsbot

Long Qingquan #CHN wins weightlifting gold in men's 56kg, beating Om Yun Chol #PRK.

 — @wpolympicsbot

So far, Heliograf only has 389 followers, many of whom appear to be other journalists and media people. However, the Washington Post is quick to remind us that this is Heliograf’s first ever job, and it hasn’t built up its social media presence yet. Like any good employer, they’re planning on adding to Heliograf’s responsibilities over the next year.

The Washington Post experiments with automated storytelling to help power 2016 Rio Olympics coverage

This is the initial iteration of Heliograf, which will continue to be developed by Post engineers to enhance storytelling for large-scale, data-driven coverage of major news events, including the U.S. election. This technology will also be able to process a combination of different data sources, like crime and real estate numbers, customize stories depending on individual user actions, and help look for anomalies in data to alert journalists to a potential story.

Wait. “Help look for anomalies in data to alert journalists to a potential story?” This is one degree away from Person of Interest. Does Heliograf know what the Washington Post wants it to become?

There’s one more thing you need to know about Heliograf, which is that it has been assigned to work with a slightly more experienced robot, Alexa. As the WaPo puts it:

An example of how readers can ask Alexa for updates is: “Alexa, ask WaPo Olympics how many medals the U.S. has won.”

That sounds pretty cool, actually—except for the part where Heliograf, like many contemporary employees, will not only be evaluated alongside its peers at the Washington Post but also against all the other artificial intelligences in the world.

I typed “how many medals has US won” into Google, and got a color-coded chart plus images of each medalist with links to YouTube videos. Then I tapped my iPhone and said “Siri, how many medals has the US won?” and got a bunch of links to irrelevant data. (Siri thought I was asking “how many medals has the US one,” which doesn’t bode well for Siri’s next performance review.)

Still, I’ll keep an eye on Heliograf’s progress—especially because Heliograf may end up keeping track of all of ours.

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