[thalecress]

I'm skeptical of the claim that a program could win a Pulitzer. How does it decide what to write about, who to interview, and what questions to ask?

Reporting a day at the races or the markets is easy because we know which kinds of data are relevant and we have them available.

[dr_]

It's not inconceivable that, as AI advances, at some point there with be algorithms that figure out the questions you have posed.

[arethuza]

True, it's not inconceivable, but arguably having a system that is an effective investigative journalist is AI-Complete:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI-complete

[nl]

This is true but like most things has to do with AI has limitations.

In some fields (eg, finance) one can conceive a computer based process that would do a better job than most investigative journalists. It can't deal with missing data, but it can discover inaccuracies, unusual events and suspicious patterns and in some limited fields this is enough.

For example, an AI based process might have been just as good at finding the problems at Enron as conventional journalists were (since it the problems there were mostly uncovered by forensic accounting on their public balance sheets):

But hard information was scarce. "It's almost as if you have to use forensic accountants when you're doing a company story because many companies are using very aggressive accounting techniques that are perfectly legal," Shepard says.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64769-2002Jan...