At 6.28 am on 17 March 2014 the Los Angeles Times published a story about an earthquake that had shaken California only 3 minutes earlier. The prose was informative but plain: "A shallow magnitude 4.7 earthquake was reported Monday morning five miles from Westwood, California, according to the US Geological Survey. The tremblor occurred at 6.25 am Pacific time at a depth of 5.0 miles." The report appeared with the byline of Ken Schwencke, a journalist and programmer for the paper. But the credit ought have gone to Schwencke's computer, which wrote the story without human input.
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