Inteligencia artificial en RTVE al servicio de la España vacía. Proyecto de cobertura informativa con redacción automatizada para las elecciones municipales de 2023

RLCS, Revista Latina de Comunicación Social, 81, 1-16 [Research] https://www.doi.org/10.4185/RLCS-2023-1550| ISSN 1138-5820 | Year 2023 Received: 16/11/2021 Accepted: 03/02/2022 Published: 07/04/2022 1 Artificial intelligence in RTVE at the service of empty Spain. News coverage project with automated writing for the 2023 municipal elections Inteligencia artificial en RTVE al servicio de la España vacía. Proyecto de cobertura informativa con redacción automatizada para las elecciones municipales de 2023 Luisa Graciela Aramburú Moncada. Universidad de Sevilla. España. [email protected] [CV]v Isaac López Redondo. Universidad de Sevilla. España. [email protected] [CV] Antonio López Hidalgo. Universidad de Sevilla. España. [email protected] [CV] How to cite this article / Normalized reference Aramburú Moncada, L. G., López Redondo, I y López Hidalgo, A. (2021). Artificial intelligence in RTVE at the service of empty Spain. News coverage project with automated writing for the 2023 municipal elections. Revista Latina de Comunicación Social, 81, 1-16. https://www.doi.org/10.4185/RLCS-2023-1550 RESUMEN Introducción: La redacción automatizada es uno de los avances tecnológicos que más interrogantes despierta, pero también expectativas, dentro de la aplicación de la inteligencia artificial en los medios de comunicación. En la actualidad, RTVE (Radio Televisión Española) trabaja en un proyecto piloto junto a la empresa Narrativa Inteligencia Artificial para cubrir las elecciones de 2023 en los municipios que forman parte de la llamada España vacía. Un proyecto que contempla la escritura automática de noticias a partir de una herramienta tecnológica que interprete y transforme los resultados electorales y los convierta en noticias sin la intervención humana. Metodología: El presente trabajo parte de la revisión sistemática de bibliografía existente en torno a la materia que trata y constituye un estudio de caso en el que se han realizado entrevistas abiertas a cuatro de los responsables de las empresas mencionadas. Discusión y resultados: Una iniciativa pionera de última generación en la que RTVE, utilizando la tecnología como palanca, pretende incrementar la difusión y el alcance de las noticias en regiones con escasa cobertura periodística. Conclusiones: La inteligencia artificial aplicada al periodismo revierte en competitividad, flexibilidad, fluidez y rapidez. Este cambio de paradigma para la profesión debe tener sus límites en un código ético que regule esta innovadora forma de automatizar la redacción. Sin embargo, su uso adecuado permitirá, como en este caso, integrar y vertebrar territorios, con formatos de noticias adaptados a cada destinatario. PALABRAS CLAVE: Inteligencia artificial; redacción automatizada; España vacía; RTVE; innova- RLCS, Revista Latina de Comunicación Social, 81, 1-16 [Research] https://www.doi.org/10.4185/RLCS-2023-1550| ISSN 1138-5820 | Year 2023 Received: 16/11/2021 Accepted: 03/02/2022 Published: 07/04/2022 2 ción; elecciones municipales; narrativas periodísticas. ABSTRACT Introduction: Automated news writing is one of the technological advances that raises most questions, but also expectations, within the application of artificial intelligence in the media. Currently, RTVE (Radio Televisión Española) is working on a pilot project together with the company Narrativa Inteligencia Artificial to cover the municipal elections of 2023 in the areas that are part of the so-called empty Spain. A project that contemplates the automatic writing of news by a technological tool that interprets and transforms the election results and turns them into news without human intervention. Methodology: This work is based on the systematic review of existing literature on the subject and is a case study in which open interviews have been conducted with four of the managers of the companies mentioned. Discussion and results: A pioneering, state-of-the-art initiative in which RTVE, using technology as a lever, aims to increase the dissemination and reach of news in regions with scarce journalistic coverage. Conclusions: The artificial intelligence applied to journalism leads to competitiveness, flexibility, fluidity and fast. This paradigm shift for the profession must have its limits in a code of ethics that rules this innovative way of automating the writing of news. Nevertheless, its proper use will allow, as in this case, to integrate and vertebrate territories, with news formats adapted to each target audience. KEYWORDS: Artificial Intelligence; automated news writing; empty Spain; RTVE; innovation; municipal elections; journalistic narratives. CONTENIDO 1. Introducción. 1.1. La España vacía 2. Metodología y objetivos. 3. Discusión y resultados. 3.1. RTVE e Inteligencia artificial: ¿Riesgos u oportunidades? 3.2. RTVE y su experiencia piloto: un robot redactando noticias políticas para la España vacía. 4. Conclusiones. 5. Referencias. 6. Currículum vitae CONTENT 1. Introduction. 1.1. The Empty Spain. 2. Methodology and objectives. 3. Discussion and results. 3.1. RTVE and Artificial Intelligence: Risks or opportunities? 3.2. RTVE and its pilot experience: a robot writing political news for the Empty Spain. 4. Conclusions. 5. References. 6. Curriculum vitae Translation by Paula González (Universidad Católica Andrés Bello, Venezuela) 1. Introduction Journalism is moving towards robotization at a time of crisis and change. New technologies are unleashing a metamorphosis in journalists’ work routines and generating new narratives. All this as a result of the evolution of the so-called artificial intelligence. As Alfonseca (2014) recalls, this term was invented by John Mcarthy in 1956 to name the field of computer science that is dedicated to the study and design of intelligent machines. A few years earlier, in 1950, Alan Turing had already tried to define this concept through the so-called Turing Test, which established that if a machine is capable of deceiving human beings, pretending to be human, with the same ease with which a human being can deceive another, it should be considered intelligent. In the field of language, Alfonseca considers that a computer must understand what it writes and be aware of the situation to be able to strictly speak of artificial intelligence. In any case, artificial intelligence represents one of the most drastic and surprising renovations that the profession has faced for many years and has already been incorporated into the routines of marketing, advertising, writing, or infographics departments in many companies. Josep Luis Micó (2017) says that if the technology giants have committed to this trend with conviction and strong investments, the media should also try it. Companies like Alphabet, the business conglomerate in which Google is integrated, or Apple have carried out a similar expansion policy in recent years, with the purchase of firms dedicated to artificial intelligence. Competitors such as Facebook, Intel, and Twitter are somewhat behind in absorbing startups but also in the same line. Automation is no longer a possible threat to the journalistic profession but rather a reality with almost unpredictable consequences, where it is not clear whether it will benefit or harm those who have made its routines possible until now. The possibility of machines replacing human labor in this sector is still far away. This is, at least, the opinion of Quijje (2017) when referring to an article published by RLCS, Revista Latina de Comunicación Social, 81, 1-16 [Research] https://www.doi.org/10.4185/RLCS-2023-1550| ISSN 1138-5820 | Year 2023 Received: 16/11/2021 Accepted: 03/02/2022 Published: 07/04/2022 3 The Economist in December 2017. This article was written with software that he learned from previous science and technology articles published in the journal. The result was, according to the author, comforting, absurd, and sometimes hilarious: a large number of scientific words were merged by the software. The author further states that automation will likely give journalists more work rather than replace them. It seems clear that changes in production routines will force journalists to define their functions and roles, as they will not be able to compete with some of the advantages offered by automatic writing presented by the computer, such as low marginal cost, the speed with which the articles can be written, and the broad spectrum of events that can be covered. However, as Van Dalen (2012) argues, journalists will be able to spend more time on research and in-depth journalism; compared to mechanical texts generated by machines, they will be able to produce higher quality texts; Furthermore, automated writing allows the media to cover certain news stories that usually do not have a place on the agenda, such as small sporting events followed by a minority audience. Ronderos (2019) recalls that this so-called “automated journalism” will be one of the purposes for which artificial intelligence will be used in this profession. It is, according to this journalist, to create stories from data. Originally, it was used to report sports and financial news. The advantage is that it frees the journalist from other routines and reduces costs. AP uses Wordsmith Software to turn financial data into news items. The Washington Post uses Heliograf technology to report on sporting events and election campaigns. There are already many examples of automated writing. On March 17th, 2014, the Los Angeles Times published this text: A low-magnitude 4.7 earthquake struck five miles from Westwood, California on Monday morning, according to the US Geological Survey. The earthquake occurred at 6:25 AM Pacific time at a depth of five miles. According to the USGS, the epicenter was six miles from Beverly Hills, California, seven miles from Universal City, California, seven miles from Santa Monica, California, and 348 miles from Sacramento, California. In the last ten days, there have been no earthquakes of magnitude 3.0 or greater. This information comes from the USGS Earthquake Notification Service and this publication was created by an algorithm (Rodríguez, 2018). The 96 words of this text were the work of a robot. Ken Schwencke, a journalist and programmer for the Los Angeles Times, the fourth-largest-selling newspaper in the US, felt the earthquake at 6:25 a.m. He got up quickly from the bed, count the teletype, and went running to his computer. He logged on to the newspaper’s content management system and found all 96 words written. He glanced at the text and hit publish. And that is how this newspaper became the first media outlet to report on the earthquake. The algorithm, called Quakebot, had taken only three minutes to write the news (Rodríguez, 2018). But Quakebot is not capable of writing news on its own. It is programmed to select relevant data from some reports, in this case from the United States Geological Survey. It then includes them in a pre-written template. Later, the news, already in the newspaper’s content management system, is pending review and publication by a journalist. This process is known as automated journalism. Quakebot doesn’t assess the damage it caused on the ground, can’t interview experts, and can’t discern the notoriety of different aspects of the story. But it’s only a matter of time. In fact, Ken Schwencke, creator of the writing algorithm, already pointed out in 2014 that it was only something complementary and that it would never completely replace the work of a writer. Another example of commitment to these emerging technologies is the Lynx Insight tool, which analyzes Thomson Reuters data to identify facts and potential financial articles. The aforementioned tool works with language generation software capable of writing headlines and creating structured sentences in templates. The resulting articles are highly useful to your customer base, delivering financial data vital to their interests in milliseconds. From them, editors can also develop their texts or start their research. On the other hand, the Reuters News Tracer program has enabled journalists to gain an eight-minute to one-hour head start on other media when reporting on breaking news. However, machines still write bad stories, according to Reginald Chua, Reuters executive editor for editorial operations. For this reason, the agency tests hybrid operations, in which the robot performs the data RLCS, Revista Latina de Comunicación Social, 81, 1-16 [Research] https://www.doi.org/10.4185/RLCS-2023-1550| ISSN 1138-5820 | Year 2023 Received: 16/11/2021 Accepted: 03/02/2022 Published: 07/04/2022 4 processing operation and the journalist writes articles with the base provided by Artificial Intelligence. Writers are also needed to identify the newsworthiness of the facts. Indeed, the machines do not understand the context or the nuances, or how to get readers to engage with the stories, according to Chua (Garciamartín, 2018). Christer Clerwall of Karlstad University in Sweden conducted a study to measure the public’s impression of the quality and level of acceptance of texts produced with automatic writing software. This study highlighted the difficulties of readers when it comes to identifying the authorship of the texts. As part of the procedure, the authorship of each text was hidden and readers were asked questions related to the quality, credibility, and objectivity they perceived in them. As a result, texts written by human journalists received higher scores for coherence, quality of writing, clarity, and readability, while text generated by the software was considered more descriptive, informative, credible, and objective. The respondents were not able to distinguish the authorship of the texts (Clerwall, 2014). The Automated Insights company has been working with augmented reality since 2000 to develop the Wordsmith computer system, a software capable of creating prose texts based on data. It first started writing small pieces of sports journalism, based on data and statistics, and then expanded into other fields, such as finance, which allowed it to reach an agreement with the Associated Press in 2014 to produce small texts on this subject. Fernández Barrero (2021, p. 77) points out that Automated Insights uses the Wordsmith platform, an ultra-fast editor capable of producing 4,400 news items per quarter, thus multiplying by 14 the production of finance news, with an extension of between 150 and 300 words. It is a text apparently written by a human being that contains a note at the end stating that it has been written by an algorithm. Fernández Barrero states that the application of automatic writing is still in an experimental phase. On the other hand, the application of Artificial Intelligence to humanoid robotics has not achieved the desired results either, so that, far from the initial fears of journalists about a displacement in their functions, these technologies are for the moment freeing the information professionals of mechanical processes and leaving room for the development of creativity, a framework with which mechanization cannot compete at the moment (Fernández Barrero, 2021, p. 92). However, some see automated news writing as more efficient and satisfying for workers, alerting them to job losses, but they agree on the generation of new professional profiles and, also, on the reconversion of the professional from mere editor to a supervisor or text editor (Segarra-Saavedra et al., 2019). Equally striking is the fact that there is no clear awareness among journalism professionals that the generation of news through algorithms has ceased to be a possibility and has become a reality. Many journalists are unaware that some international media and agencies have already replaced their editors with computer apps to prepare the content they transmit to their audiences (Túñez-López et al., 2018). The Spanish company Narrativa Inteligencia Artificial, established in 2015, has its headquarters in Estonia and two major operations centers in Madrid and Dubai, from where it carries out e-commerce projects. It is the only Spanish company that writes journalistic texts through software, Gabriele, to distribute them to different media outlets. The product and the formats used by Narrativa Inteligencia Artificial reflect the cultural and technological change that the media industry is undergoing. Since its launch, this company has customized its services to generate and capture value and respond to the demands of different companies and industries that deal with data overloads, such as the financial sector, e-commerce, real estate, and the health and telecommunications sectors. In the field of the media, it has generated automated news for outlets such as El Confidencial, Sport, El Periódico, El Independiente, 20 Minutos, El Heraldo, La Información, and MediaPro, besides internationally collaborating with the Associated Press agency for the joint writing of texts (Ufarte Ruiz and Manfredi Sánchez, 2019). Hand in hand with Narrativa Inteligencia Artificial, Radio Televisión Española will carry out a pilot project to cover the 2023 municipal elections that will consist of the automated generation of news on this subject. The objective is to meet the demand for information from the small towns included in so-called empty Spain, usually far from the focus of media attention. 1.1. Empty Spain Spain has been an eminently rural country until well into the 20th century. In less than twenty years, RLCS, Revista Latina de Comunicación Social, 81, 1-16 [Research] https://www.doi.org/10.4185/RLCS-2023-1550| ISSN 1138-5820 | Year 2023 Received: 16/11/2021 Accepted: 03/02/2022 Published: 07/04/2022 5 cities doubled and tripled in size, while vast expanses of land on the interior that were never very populated emptied and entered the cycle of rural decline. Between 1950 and 1970, the exodus to the city took place. In a very short time, the field was abandoned. Thousands of villages disappeared and thousands of others were left as nursing homes, without any economic activity and the most basic services (Del Molino, 2016). That depopulated Spain, generally rural and anchored within the geography, demands infrastructure and maintaining its way of life (Vega, 2019). It is the so-called “Empty Spain”. Empty Spain is a vast territory that has no cities. In its most restrictive version, it extends over 268,083 square kilometers without a coastline and with a notable elevation above sea level. It occupies more than half of the total of Spain, 53% of the territory. 7,317,420 people live in it, which represents 15.8% of the Spanish population. In other words, the Spanish population is distributed very unequally: it is highly concentrated in a few points and is almost non-existent in a large part of the country (Del Molino, 2016). This demographic phenomenon converges, on the one hand, a low rate of natural growth of the population, and on the other, the abandonment of population centers by the active population that does not find employment opportunities in them. This fact, together with the increase in life expectancy of the inhabitants, is causing a decadent and slow agony in municipalities and localities in which the young population moves to areas with “more opportunities”, while older people remain anchored in these areas, which fall, not only into depopulation but also into oblivion. Chart 1: Provinces that have gained and lost population (in percentage) during the period 1996-2020. Source: Own elaboration based on INE data. This phenomenon, as can be seen in charts 1 and 2, is occurring with greater intensity in the autonomous communities of Northern Spain, skewing mainly towards Castilla-León, Asturias, Galicia, Extremadura, or Aragón. The population that leaves these areas ends up moving towards coastal areas or large cities. RLCS, Revista Latina de Comunicación Social, 81, 1-16 [Research] https://www.doi.org/10.4185/RLCS-2023-1550| ISSN 1138-5820 | Year 2023 Received: 16/11/2021 Accepted: 03/02/2022 Published: 07/04/2022 6 Chart 2: Percentage of municipalities in each autonomous community that have lost population (in percentage) during the period 1996-2020. Source: Own elaboration based on INE data. For this reason, converting these areas into information centers and bringing news events closer together can contribute to their greater integration within Spanish territory, which can lead journalism to develop its social function through greater structuring of the territory. This is the purpose of the aforementioned project that RTVE will carry out in 2023 on the occasion of the municipal elections, and its possible repercussions will be studied and analyzed in the following lines. 2. Methodology and objectives The methodological design of this research is based on the systematic review of the existing scientific literature on Artificial Intelligence applied to the media and, particularly, to everything that surrounds automated writing in newsrooms, as well as an approach to the reality of the so-called empty Spain, which has made it possible to discover the main contributions to the issue. The present work constitutes a qualitative case study in which we have used the so-called “Homer Simpson” strategy (Santana Leitner, 2013, p.135), where the objective is to analyze in detail a typical, average, or standard case in a way that the results apply to a wide range of cases. The interest is focused on the pilot project of RTVE (Radio Televisión Española) to cover the municipal elections of 2023 in towns with a small population, in which it is already working with the support of the Narrativa Inteligencia Artificial company. This project contemplates the automatic generation or writing of news in the small towns of so-called empty Spain from a technological tool that interprets and transforms the electoral results and converts them into news items without human intervention. The objective is to cover the information of approximately five thousand Spanish municipalities whose population do not exceed one thousand inhabitants. Beyond the general objective of knowing the operation of the project proposed by RTVE, the present work proposes a series of objectives related to the application of Artificial Intelligence in the particular case that concerns us in these pages. These are: - Describe the benefits and negative effects of the application of Artificial Intelligence in the work routines of the public entity. - Analyze its economic and technical feasibility. - Describe the informative content that will be generated within this project and evaluate its impact on the population of the small towns that make up Empty Spain. RLCS, Revista Latina de Comunicación Social, 81, 1-16 [Research] https://www.doi.org/10.4185/RLCS-2023-1550| ISSN 1138-5820 | Year 2023 Received: 16/11/2021 Accepted: 03/02/2022 Published: 07/04/2022 7 Within the research, we have carried out four open or unstructured interviews. In this sense, on October 22nd, 2021 we interviewed David Llorente, general manager of Narrativa; On October 28th, we interviewed Pere Vila Fumás, Director of Technological Strategy and Digital Innovation at Radio Televisión Española; On November 3rd, we interviewed Cristina Blanco González, Narrativa’s Customer Success Manager; and, finally, on November 4th of this year, we interviewed Alberto Moratilla, CTO of Narrativa. 3. Discussion and results 3.1. RTVE and Artificial Intelligence: Risks or opportunities? The irruption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the media is becoming more and more evident. Its use in newsrooms is being introduced gradually and progressively, but without a doubt, with great expectations. In 2015, Radio Televisión Española (RTVE) began a research program on innovation in audiovisual journalism, focused on researching the opportunities offered by the various systems based on intelligent information processing. And it is that RTVE seeks to be a pioneer in research projects with the use of this new technology applied to news (Vila Fumás, P., personal communication, October 28th, 2021). The projects are supported by multidisciplinary workgroups that combine both journalistic knowledge through students and teachers and the know-how of experts in Artificial Intelligence processes. Although the project has a theoretical research base, its purpose is to apply it to the journalistic world. Studies but also explorations. The research works, which date back six years, are being developed hand in hand with the University, through joint chairs on innovation methods and systems, within the new framework of the information society. This is how the RTVE-UAB Chair (with the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona) was born and the creation of an observatory for News Innovation in the Digital Society (OI2). The engineer Pere Vila Fumás, director of Technological Strategy and Digital Innovation of Radio Televisión Española, defends that Artificial Intelligence is something more important and profound than a simple robot that writes news. He states that for RTVE it constitutes different and independent tools from one another that are entering the house’s publication and that contribute to speeding up and optimizing journalistic work: “We are monitoring different phases of Artificial Intelligence to the extent possible and we are integrating them little by little to the rhythm of the informative work of the journalists. They are tools that contribute not only to getting the job done faster but also more efficiently” (Vila Fumás, P., personal communication, October 28th, 2021). Vila details that these projects began by exploring what exists in the scientific, technological, and journalistic world about AI. Within technology, they have thoroughly researched the bases of its procedures as well as its methods, and within journalism with what criteria these systems are being applied, what is happening, and what is the opinion that its application is generating among journalists. The second step was to know the companies that are offering these services worldwide, locate them, and try to have descriptions. Subsequently, they went on to research the media outlets that were using these tools and analyzed the success stories and failures. The penultimate step of these projects is to see their feasibility and application within their news programs to, finally, design their incorporation into RTVE’s audiovisual newsrooms. Hence, this corporation seeks to apply a pilot plan in the 2023 elections, using AI within the coverage of political news in Spanish municipalities with less than a thousand inhabitants. News automation is a system that quickly raises concerns among information professionals. Its detractors state that it is an instrument that will generate the dismissal of many journalists, and its defenders, that it will contribute to speeding up journalistic work (Graefe, 2016; Hansen et al., 2017; Cerezo, 2018; Fernández Barrero, 2018). In any case, there are already news items in the world produced by AI (Lewis et al., 2019) and it is the first time that a Spanish media outlet is going to offer news of electoral results from places where they were never previously broadcast by a media outlet. The director of Technological Strategy and Digital Innovation of RTVE defends the project: I think that televisions cannot be oblivious to the new realities. There are two fatal aptitudes: one is to think that nothing is wrong and the other is to think that it will save your life. I think that neither one thing nor the other happens. But simply what you have to do is be RLCS, Revista Latina de Comunicación Social, 81, 1-16 [Research] https://www.doi.org/10.4185/RLCS-2023-1550| ISSN 1138-5820 | Year 2023 Received: 16/11/2021 Accepted: 03/02/2022 Published: 07/04/2022 8 attentive, know it, understand it, and, to the extent that it is useful to you, implement them (Vila Fumás, P., personal communication, October 28th, 2021). 3.2. RTVE and its pilot experience: a robot writing political news for empty Spain The automation of news with intelligent algorithms is one of the new tools introduced by AI in the 21st century. Furthermore, technological innovation in journalism has become fundamental (Küng, 2013). It has even been shown that not presenting consistent innovation distances oneself from the audience (Posetti, 2018). Hence RTVE’s initiative to implement an AI system for news production. This innovation will consist of a pilot experience that will be carried out in the municipal elections of 2023, will focus on towns with a small population, and will pursue the objective of journalistic coverage of this event through AI processes generated from the electoral data provided by official information sources. This is an applied research project, on which RTVE is already working, and which has the support of the Spanish company Narrativa Inteligente Artificial S.L., a start-up specialized in the generation of natural language that has already collaborated with media such as Agencia Efe, Diario Sport, and El Confidencial. Within the project, this start-up will make its artificial intelligence technology available to RTVE for the creation of narratives. The automatic generation or writing of news in the small towns of deep Spain seeks that the technological tool interprets and transforms the electoral results and converts them into news items without human intervention. The objective is to cover the information of approximately five thousand municipalities, throughout the Spanish territory, whose peculiarity is that they have a maximum of one thousand inhabitants. In this pilot plan, the State Corporation has seven professionals, including technicians and journalists, while Narrativa, for its part, offers five members of its team, including Natural Language Processing (PLN) engineers, experts in automatic content, and developers. The director of Technological Strategy and Digital Innovation highlights that his department is focused on offering support from the University to the project of automatic writing of journalistic texts. See the possibility of having 10, 12, 15 different narrations of the events so that they are not always the same story. That the narratives are in many forms and with various nuances. Master these new techniques to learn about the possibilities behind a few standard stories and how you can take full advantage of this system to cover not only the elections but also present useful topics for its inhabitants: For example, informing that it is going to rain tomorrow... but we should know that this population has been waiting for water for a long time: and therefore, the story there is “it is finally going to rain, tomorrow!”. But that same rain can be located in a place where it has been raining for days and whose population is fed up with so much rain. The message must be different: What a disaster, tomorrow it will rain again! (Vila Fumás, P., personal communication, October 28th, 2021). For her part and along the same lines, Carmen Pérez Cernuda, deputy director of Technology and Digital Strategy at RTVE, highlights the possibilities offered by this pilot plan amid populations that, until now, had not been able to be served with information that would develop their concerns and interests: “It will make possible the arrival of news that is more real and focused on what truly interests the users of so-called empty Spain” (Corral, 2021). This is how RTVE understands it with the implementation of a pilot news automation project in small municipalities in the 2023 elections. This project has two fundamental objectives: to bring political information closer to populations never before served by journalism and to facilitate the journalistic work of the professionals of this communication house, offering them more time and resources for the creation of their own content or of higher quality: The focus of this project is aimed at offering journalistic coverage never seen before. We will have, thanks to AI, access to information that was unthinkable in other times since we do not have the necessary personnel to cover the entire territory of Spain. RTVE has 1,800 journalists who write thousands of news items weekly for radio, television, and the new digital media. The writing of texts is an essential part of the work we do and this system RLCS, Revista Latina de Comunicación Social, 81, 1-16 [Research] https://www.doi.org/10.4185/RLCS-2023-1550| ISSN 1138-5820 | Year 2023 Received: 16/11/2021 Accepted: 03/02/2022 Published: 07/04/2022 9 will allow us to approach a population that for the first time will have access to information specific to their locality. Topics that have the same right to be covered and reported on as other events. This is a relevant fact in the audiovisual sector (Vila Fumás, P., personal communication, October 28th, 2021). Pere Vila states that, moreover, this pilot will help the staff of this channel to experiment, learn, and train within the irruption of this technology throughout the thirty months in which its development has been planned. There are three important moments or stages in the development of this system, which is in charge of the Department of Innovation and Technological Planning. The first stage has to do with the conceptual design that the news will have, the second stage with the elaboration of the structure of the product, and the third stage has to do with the style that the texts will present. The idea is that the information is not cold or repetitive but rather that it retains a singularity that makes it different from the gray news that robots usually present: “One of the priorities within this innovation is to discover new uses and applications to be at the forefront of technological innovations” (Vila Fumás, P., personal communication, October 28th, 2021). Vila affirms that this applied research, for RTVE, seeks to achieve five main objectives. First, the knowledge of the state, the real application, and the result in the practice of the use of the automatic generation of news. Second, to offer a service never before provided by a media outlet in Spain aimed at generating content of greater relevance and social sensitivity, improving informative aspects focused on empty Spain. Third, form, within the television corporation, an interdisciplinary group made up of technicians and journalists who end up being specialists in the use of artificial intelligence within the field of journalism. Fourth, seek to integrate the various technologies since they are convinced that they will have a very important impact and could be decisive in the future of the sector; and, finally, in fifth place, placing Radio Televisión Española on the map of Artificial Intelligence applied by important media outlets worldwide: The idea is not only that users of a town receive the news of the municipal elections of their locality in a fast way but also that they can have access to an image, a photo, graphics, and that they can also hear it through the voice from one of our news anchors in that location. We are already in talks with them and there are several interested in lending their voices to the project. Additionally, we want them to have access to information from other towns in which they have family, friends, etc. And that they are interested in reading or listening. Also, we want the news items to have modules connected to social networks. Bring technology closer to journalism and its benefits to all its inhabitants. One of the fundamental functions that Radio Televisión Española must exercise is to offer all populations the possibility of presenting their issues (Vila Fumás, P., personal communication, October 28th, 2021). Topics and information that are not usually covered by the corporation’s journalists and that now, the Innovation and Technology department seeks to generate in a matter of minutes. With the launch of this pilot, they not only want to provide a greater amount of news but also offer a higher quality of information for the inhabitants of those areas. Automatically generated news items tend to look very similar and RTVE is working to prevent this from happening, incorporating a huge amount of information and its journalists carefully monitoring the material to help the system provide unique information. Furthermore, Vila emphasizes: “It is not a substitution economy, it is an economy of production of something that we cannot be doing. There are economic aspects but there are feasibility aspects” (Vila Fumás, P., personal communication, October 28th, 2021). For her part, Cristina Blanco González, Customer Success Manager of Artificial Intelligence Narrati- ve, highlights that her company provides RTVE with a tool for generating journalistic articles based on data, using the latest Artificial Intelligence techniques that allow the generation of large volumes of personalized texts. Information that could not be offered previously since it was unfeasible to carry out adequate coverage in five thousand small municipalities using traditional media because of capacity. It is now possible not only for each of the municipalities in Spain to have an informative article on the results of the elections but also for the citizens of those localities to have, in real-time, each of the advances in the count that will take place on election night, which RLCS, Revista Latina de Comunicación Social, 81, 1-16 [Research] https://www.doi.org/10.4185/RLCS-2023-1550| ISSN 1138-5820 | Year 2023 Received: 16/11/2021 Accepted: 03/02/2022 Published: 07/04/2022 16 Isaac López Redondo Universidad de Sevilla Isaac López-Redondo is a journalist and professor at the Faculty of Communication in Seville. He has worked in media such as El Correo de Andalucía, El Día de Córdoba, or Canal Sur Televisión. Since 2012, he has a Ph.D. in journalism with a thesis on the treatment of videogames in the written and digital press. In 2014 he founded the Héroes de Papel publishing house, where he has edited and corrected nearly a hundred works dedicated to video games and popular culture. He is the author of numerous papers, conferences, and scientific articles on journalistic narratives and video games. He is also the author of the books Cosas que cuentan, ¿Qué es un videojuego? and La certeza de empezar: Antología de textos periodísticos. He has also coordinated La mirada del periodista. [email protected] Orcid ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9426-6683 Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.es/citations?user=Gst3wNYAAAAJ&hl=es ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Isaac-Lopez-Redondo Antonio López Hidalgo Universidad de Sevilla Antonio López Hidalgo es periodista y catedrático de Periodismo en la Facultad de Comunicación de la Universidad de Sevilla. Director del Departamento de Periodismo II y director del Grupo de Investigación “Narrativas Periodísticas y Tecnologías Emergentes”. En 1990 publica, junto a Juan Emilio Ballesteros, El sindicato clandestino de la Guardia Civil, libro por el que fue procesado y posteriormente absuelto. Fruto de su investigación académica, sobresalen los títulos La entrevista. Entre la información y la creatividad; Las entrevistas periodísticas de José María Carretero; El titular; Géneros periodísticos complementarios; Periodismo de inmersión para desenmascarar la realidad -escrito conjuntamente con Mª Ángeles Fernández Barrero-; El periodismo que contará el futuro o el volumen internacional bajo su coordinación Periodismo narrativo en América Latina. [email protected] Orcid ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1595-7043 Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.es/citations?user=7MxHFrkAAAAJ&hl=es