Pakistani tech company builds robot journalist

It’s an elite club of companies which create artificial intelligence softwares and programs. Computers are now able to paint masterpieces, write poetry, author a novel or a screenplay on their own. One of the five or so firms working in this area is baseH, a Pakistani company.

On Monday, baseH announced the launch of an AI Writer, an artificially intelligent content generator, at their headquarters in Karachi. 

The non-human hack, named Dante, had already been writing Pakistan Stock Exchange closing reports. 

But starting this week, it would be used to pen small news reports after accessing and storing data from local and international media outlets.

The company hopes that in the long run, AI will be able to act as a supplement, helping newspapers, channels and blogs by freeing up time for editors and reporters.

“Our focus at the moment are media houses that can produce endless content with the same staff and in practically no time,” states the website, 

“The Dante A.I. writer has the capability to pick up the style of writing where it is being deployed as well as quickly adapt to new writing styles and set of editorial policies or preferences.”

BaseH is a small company made up of young IT professionals. For their new project, software engineers from the NED University were also taken on board.

Stories generated by the AI were sent for screening to senior Pakistani journalists. 

One of whom Geo.tv spoke to and he admitted that he could not tell the difference between a story by a human and one by a machine.

Though Dante is not the first of its kind, it surely is one of the first entrants into an industry still in its embryonic stages.