Neil Thurman

Professor of Communication
Department of Communication Studies and Media Research
LMU Munich

Neil Thurman

From the Blog

Our new study has found that readers find traditionally-crafted news articles more comprehensible than articles produced with automation. Deficiencies readers perceive in the automated articles’ handling of numbers and word choice partly explain why they were harder to understand.

With the vast array of options of what to watch online, have you ever wondered why you picked that new comedy or that old documentary? Would you have chosen to watch them if they were on terrestrial TV? How much were you nudged to choose them by subtle prompts from the online streaming platforms?

News organizations—including Bloomberg, Reuters, and The Economist—have been using A.I. powered video services to meet growing audience demand for audio-visual material. Our new research shows that such automated production of news videos is better with human supervision.