# Integrating Chatbot Media Automations in Professional Journalism: An Evaluation Framework
## 2 Related Work
### Chatbots and Media Automations in Journalism  
Many people consider chatbots to be a fairly recent development, given the fact that commercial use of this technology has only started to become prominent in the past decade or so. In reality, however, efforts by researchers to create a program capable of conversing with humans naturally have been going on for the better part of a century. Often regarded as the predecessor of all chatbots, ELIZA was created by the German scientist [PERSON] [17] and managed to engage its conversational partners to such a degree that many of them reported that they believed they were addressing a real person [18]. From that point onwards, many researchers attempted to simulate human communication with computer programs, which led to the creation of many prominent examples of capable conversational agents over the years. Despite the rich historical development of chatbot technology, however, what indeed constitutes a relatively new phenomenon is the inclusion of these programs in the process of creating and disseminating news. This was a by-product of the general tendency for computational procedures to graduallywork themselves into the practices of the journalistic profession, subsequently creating what was later called \"automated journalism\", frequently also referred to as \"robotic\", \"algorithmic\", or \"computational\" journalism [19]. Chatbots in journalism can be used for efficient user interaction in the sense that they provide a more human-like way of navigating and accessing news-related content. Generally speaking, chatbots are a sub-section of the more general term AI agent, which is used to describe artificially intelligent software capable of performing a variety of tasks. In the case of rule-based chatbots, these tasks center around providing the user with content based on their answers to the predefined questions of a conversation. In a more sophisticated approach, chatbots can also generate original content, through algorithmic techniques like text generation, document summarization etc., by applying basic concepts of algorithmic journalism. As far as chatbots are concerned, many decades had to come by until the first proper use of one for purely journalistic purposes could be identified. Specifically, in 2014, the Los Angeles Times employed the services of an automated AI agent that was capable of data extraction and simplified content creation. The program, aptly named \"Quakebot\", was tasked with monitoring data from the U.S. Geological Survey and utilizing any information it could find regarding seismic activity to write and publish simple reports in realtime. Even though Quakebot only amounted to a very simple use of this type of technology-and even at the time, it was being compared to nothing more than an intern with a lot of time in their hands [20]--it still embodied the essence of what the introduction of such programs meant for the journalistic profession: cheap and easy to maintain labor, that could substitute, or even surpass, human journalists in some tedious and time-consuming tasks. On that basis, what followed during the next half of the decade was a massive increase in the introduction of automated elements into journalism, with chatbots being one of the technologies at the forefront of that wave of change, as, over time, many news organizations started realizing the potential benefits of automatic content dissemination [21]. Companies gradually started utilizing the unique qualities of conversational agents to spread their content more efficiently-particularly through websites like social media-which led to the creation of the term \"News Bots\", a sub-category of chatbots that specialize in interacting with audiences and spreading news information [22].