This article does not exist (it really doesn't)

I remember reading a Forbes news article a few years ago, and the article was incoherent and the structure of the sentences was all over the place. I remember thinking that the writer was either really bad at English, or exceedingly drunk.

Over the course of the years, the coherency improved, along with the fluidity of the sentences. It has been a while since I have come across articles like this. So why did they disappear? Did the writer finally learn to write English, or did he stop drinking at work?

It was not until I read about automated journalism that i understood what was really happening. The articles were written by AI. The fascinating part about this is that i witnessed the gradual improvement of an AI - generating news articles - and I din not even notice it.

AI has come a long way in terms of generating news articles. It can now generate news articles that are unrecognizable from articles written by humans. It is still a while until it can generate in-depth stories, but simple and structured articles like sports recap, earnings reports and stocks is now a walk in the park for AI.

To give you an example, have a look at these news stories written by an AI. It routinely scrapes the titles of articles from Reddit and Hacker News, and generates a news article based ONLY on the title of the article. Pretty fascinating stuff if you ask me.