ABSTRACT
The Turing Test was devised by Alan Turing as a means of determining whether humans would be able to differentiate between machine and human responses. A study by Young and Hermida in 2015 found that the Los Angeles Times was engaging in what the authors called “computational journalism”, the use of the newspaper’s Homicide Report and Data Desk to generate material for news stories. The activities at the LA Times are part of a much wider phenomenon, what Ornebring and Conill refer to as the “outsourcing of newswork”. The most extensive survey of automated journalism at the time of writing is Andreas Graefe’s Guide to Automated Journalism for the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at the Colombia University School of Journalism. Algorithmic journalism can only deal with information that is made available which remains a fundamental problem for software when it comes to finding stories.
