Wordsmiths, beware: The robots are coming!

They say print media’s in trouble. But no one — until now — has suggested that we writers are also in danger of extinction.

That’s right. We can be replaced — by computer software.

It used to be Hollywood actors who were going to become extinct, their onscreen actions rendered obsolete by computer graphics, motion-capture technology and the like.

And we writers used to write snarky articles about the phenomenon, saying how easy it would be for computers to replace wooden actors like Arnold Schwarzanegger.

Ha, ha. Now the joke’s on us.

It seems a start-up software company in Evanston, Illinois has developed software that mimics the writing patterns of journalists. Narrative Science, according to the New York Times, has honed artificial intelligence to the point where its software can produce actual news writing.

They’ve had the greatest success so far replicating the prose of sports writers. Don’t ask me why.

A sample paragraph: “Wisconsin appears to be in the driver’s seat en route to a win, as it leads 51-10 after the third quarter. Wisconsin added to its lead when Russell Wilson found Jacob Pedersen for an eight-yard touchdown to make the score 44-3.”

All written by a computer.

The Narrative Science program takes streams of data — raw scores, or housing stats, for example — and translates them into 500-word articles that sound almost, well, human.

“I thought it was magic,” said one investor, upon reading a specimen of Narrative Science’s robo-prose. “It’s as if a human wrote it.”

What’s more, for each article, the company using the software service pays only about $10. Sure, that’s more than a lot of journalists earn per article in the Philippines — and it’s way more than most bloggers earn per article, which is zero. But still, it’s a sobering thought. 

In fact, it doesn’t seem a stretch that a computer will soon be able to churn out “beat” reporter styles, such as the police prose that fills “Metro” sections of newspapers, or the political reporting that largely consists of turning the sound bytes of crocodiles into something that resembles human speech.

Business articles will probably be a cinch for computers, what with all the streams of data bracketed by words like “brisk” and “stimulate.”

So what’s next? Lifestyle sections? Are these mad scientists from Illinois actually suggesting that articles about fashion, shopping, home decorating, or book, movie and art reviews can be churned out by computers?

Um, yes, they are.

Says Narrative Science’s software developer Kristian J. Hammond: “In five years, a computer program will win a Pulitzer Prize — and I’ll be damned if it’s not our technology.” (Cue: Evil laughter.)

The newspaper industry has already taken a number of hits, thanks to the new media. Bloggers, tweeters and online news sources have virtually toppled scores of print papers abroad. Now the remaining reporters face the threat of being replaced by robo-scribes. It’s enough to make you want to dash off an angry column or letter to the editor — if that job hadn’t already been outsourced to Narrative Science software.

Will science stop at nothing? Sure, it is true that our job does entail a lot of lazy shortcuts — stock phrases, clichés and dummy words that get automatically inserted into press releases and columns by less-imaginative writers. How many times do we see robotic phrases like “take it to the next level” or “it’s a game changer”? How many fashion articles resort to phrases like “pops of color” or “day to night”? Enough for you to want to strangle the writer with a taffeta scarf. And enough to concede that computers could do the job just as well.

It’s no different in the “hard” news section. How many suspects here are “killed in a gunbattle”? How many victims or grandstanding politicians seek “swift justice”? We in the news biz are often caught between a rock and a hard place (speaking of clichés): should we go with quotes from politicians that sound like they were churned out by software, or take a chance by injecting a little “flava” to the writing?

You could argue that such lazy, thoughtless writing is just hastening our own demise. Hey, if people can insert mindless phrases into their writing, then computers can do it just as easily — and cheaper.

And don’t think that fiction writers are safe from replacement. Anyone who’s read a few James Patterson novels will agree that it’s the kind of prose that computers could easily simulate, given enough data. (In fact, Patterson’s endless supply of story ideas is now reportedly handled by a team of ghost writers who churn out the actual “books” — kind of like fictional piece work.) 

Narrative Science says its software has pushed artificial intelligence to, er, the next level: it uncannily makes inferences about what language to use based on previous stories. In the case of sports reporting, it sifts through previous scores and story elements and compares them with the new game results, then “decides” what the lead of the story will be. Not a whole lot different from what sports reporters do, actually. (Of course, they’d have to customize the software for the Philippines, to insert words like “tilt” and “cager” occasionally, instead of “match” and “basketball player.”)

As of now, the software is being tried out by US newspaper chains to beef up its coverage of local youth sports or by companies seeking articles about its quarterly financial results. Not exactly New York Times bestseller stuff. Yet.

Still, computers do have one advantage over us: they’re probably a lot better and faster at fact-checking than most writers and reporters I know, who already rely on spell-check and the Internet (if they can be bothered) to verify stuff. Computers will be able to fact-check circles around us lazy-ass humans. 

But then again, reporting on girls’ lacrosse games or stockholder meetings is a far cry from coming up with real journalism, right? How can software ever match the strings of powerful verbs and colorful adjectives and intellectual pirouettes that we columnists are capable of cooking up on demand? How could we — such trained, reasoning typers of many, many important words — ever be replaced by computer technology? Right?

Uh… Er… Um…

Better start cracking that thesaurus.