Just woke from a nightmare. I'd submitted a piece to the Guardian and, when it appeared, it contained all sorts of stuff I hadn't written.
I was used to sub-editors gently straightening my prose, but this was wholesale wrecking of my original intent. I didn't mind the historical, factual and statistical additions too much - when not too intrusive, they enriched what I wrote. But it was the wholly new paragraphs that put a commercial spin into the piece that made me hopping mad.
I quickly realised that this was a barmy attempt by the newspaper to earn money from erstwhile advertisers who had found that neither print nor web models were working any more.
Fellow journalists shared my horror - mainly appalled that something was going out with their name on that they hadn't actually written. They were also horrified by the thought that their hard-won reputations for objectivity had been destroyed at a stroke by the insertion of automated 'puff'. We collectively decided to stop writing for any paper that did this to us and to make sure readers knew what they were being served.
As I say, this was a dream. (Really - it happens to me several times every night, but this is probably the first that I thought worth sharing here.) When I woke up, and before I wrote this, I dug into 'robotic writing' and found this piece from The Guardian of all places: And the Pulitzer goes to… a computer
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