Google is giving the Press Association news agency a grant of 706,000 ($806,000) to start writing stories with the help of artificial intelligence.

谷歌将向英国国家通讯社提供70.6万欧元（80.6万美元）资金，帮助其借助人工智能进行新闻写作。

The money is coming out of the tech giant’s Digital News Initiative fund, which supports digital journalism¹ in Europe.

这笔资金来自于谷歌的“数字新闻行动”基金，该基金旨在向欧洲的数字新闻行业提供资助。

The PA supplies news stories to media outlets² all over the UK and Ireland, and will be working with a startup named Urbs Media to produce 30,000 local stories a month with the help of AI.

英国国家通讯社目前向英国和爱尔兰的媒体机构提供新闻报道，未来还将和一家名为Urbs Media创业公司合作，在人工智能技术的辅助下每月撰写3万篇当地新闻报道。

The editor-in-chief of the Press Association, Peter Clifton, explained to The Guardian³ that the AI articles will be the product of collaboration⁴ with human journalists.

英国国家通讯社总编辑皮特?克里夫顿对英国《卫报》解释说，由人工智能撰写的新闻报道也会有人类记者参与。

Writers will create “detailed⁵ story templates”for topics like crime, health, and unemployment, and Urbs Media’s Radar⁶ tool (it stands for Reporters And Data And Robots) will fill in the blanks and helping⁷ localize each article.

记者将给犯罪、健康、失业等话题创建“详细的报道模板”，然后由Urbs Media的Radar（“Reporters And Data And Robots”的缩写，即“记者、数据与机器人”）工具填写这些模板中空白的地方，帮助实现每篇文章的本地化。

This sort of workflow has been used by media outlets for years, with the Los Angeles Times using AI to write news stories about earthquakes since 2014.

其实新闻媒体采用此工作流程已有数年，从2014年起《洛杉矶时报》便开始利用人工智能技术来撰写关于地震的新闻报道了。

“Skilled human journalists will still be vital in the process,”said Clifton, “but Radar allows us to harness artificial intelligence to scale up to a volume of local stories that would be impossible to provide manually.”

“经验丰富的人类记者在此新闻撰写工作中的作用仍旧至关重要，”克里夫顿说，“但是Radar可以让我们利用人工智能技术显著扩大当地新闻的数量，这个工作不可能凭人工操作完成。”