Can Machine Write Better News Than Journalist?

Since the beginning of 21 st century,information technology such as cloud computing,big data,and artificial intelligence has developed rapidly.It has gradually affected all aspects of human life.Automated journalism is the product of artificial intelligence technology application in the news communication industry.It can automatically capture a large amount of information in a short time by means of computer programs,sorting and summarizing it,and automatically generating news content.This new way of news production has also brought great changes to the journalism industry.As the marginal cost is very low and a large amount of news can be generated quickly,the current machine writing technology has been applied in many different themes,satisfying the needs of different readers.However,there are few academic articles in China to study how readers perceive the automated content.How is the quality of automated journalism compared to articles written by reporters? Can the bylines of the news affect reader's perception of the news?Focusing on these questions,this paper conducts experiment in groups and uses in-depth interview to understand readers' perception of machine written news about sports,economic and social life.The study found that readers think machine written news in China is slightly lower in quality and credibility than the news written by reporters,but the gap is not large.Also,readers have about the same perception of news with different bylines.So it has been proved that the machine written news technology is recognized by readers.Finally,this paper uses in-depth interview to know more about the current problems and limitations of automated journalism,and thus can promote the development of future machine written news.