Controvert Media, an African tech start-up, has created and is using artificial intelligence robots to automatically write and post news articles on the internet, IT News Africa reported on Wednesday saying the service was tested at the recently-concluded AFCON 2017 football tournament.
Artificial Intelligence robots – or “bots”, as they are also known, are created by software developers in order to take on repetitive tasks that would ordinarily be carried out by people.
Using artificial intelligence, the AFCON bot quickly created basic yet useful reports on final match scores, scoring players, and other data-centric information about the matches.
Speaking about the introduction of the artificial intelligence bot, Controvert Media CEO William Chui highlighted that contrary to the belief that artificial intelligence apps will push people out of jobs – an opinion held by many – the AI apps will actually create job opportunities.
“Yes, other jobs will disappear in the future, but new jobs will be created as well,” Mr. Chui emphasized. “Think about it; in 1999, all the jobs brought about by the internet today didn’t exist at all then. Jobs like ‘social media manager’, ‘blogger’ or ‘mobile app developer’, or the possibility to do animation for a film studio in Hollywood while you’re in Zimbabwe, were beyond our imagination.”
Mr. Chiparaushe articulated that deploying the bot was not without its challenges.
“With only basic data available for the matches at the tournament, the data just wasn’t comprehensive. This created a challenge for the startup’s engineering team, as the bot depends on adequate data.
“Data is a big challenge in Africa, and we had challenges working with the data available. We are currently working on technologies to make it easier to gather this data ourselves,” Mr. Chiparaushe said.
Even for a tournament as big as AFCON, data was surprisingly limited compared to other international tournaments and leagues.
Chiparaushe confirmed that the bot will be adapted to automatically write articles beyond the AFCON tournament theme and that Controvert Media is especially keen to use the bot for the local Zimbabwean league, due to kick off in March/April 2017.
