REAL LIFE NEWS: NEWSDROID REPORTS FAKE EARTHQUAKE
by Hazed
Yes, there are newsdroids in real life too. Automated systems collate data and write them into articles that get published in newspapers without human intervention. But last week one went wrong and published fake news about an earthquake.
The Los Angeles Times newsdroid falsely reported a severe earthquake had hit Santa Barbara county in California. As it happens, a quake did occur there – but it was back in 1925.
The article-writing bot uses algorithms to turn email alerts from the US Geological Survey (USGS) into news stories, posting them on the LA times website and sending out a tweet.
The fake earthquake news came when a researcher at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, noticed that the data for the 1925 earthquake recorded its centre as six miles off. He updated the web page, but in so doing, a software glitch changed the date of the quake from 1925 to 2025 – clearly the software didn’t realise there were centuries before the current one.
That triggered an email alert from the USGS, as if the earthquake had just occurred. Clearly that bit of the software didn’t know how to cope with earthquakes in the future!
The Quakebot saw the alert and turned it into a news story.
So it wasn’t the newsdroid that was at fault, it was doing exactly what it was supposed to do, it’s just that the data it was acting on was wrong. Of course, a human journalist would have spotted the error… the newsdroid displayed a classic case of artificial stupidity!
Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/06/22/la_times_bot_spreads_fake_news/
