Computers. The new religion. (and the new journalists) [OR: Who needs journalists?]

An experiment recently conducted by LMU media researchers suggests that readers like to read texts generated by computers, especially when they are unaware that what they are reading was assembled on the basis of an algorithm. In the study, 986 subjects were asked to read and evaluate online news stories. Articles which the participants believed to have been written by journalists were consistently given higher marks for readability, credibility and journalistic expertise than those that were flagged as computer-generated – even in cases where the real “author” was in fact a computer.

In spite of this preference, however, the computer-generated texts were judged to be more credible than the stories actually written by journalists. This second finding surprised even the designers of the experiment. “The automatically generated texts are full of facts and figures and the figures are listed to two decimal places. We believe that this impression of precision strongly contributes to the perception that they are more trustworthy”, says Mario Haim of the IfKW, one of the authors of the paper. (1)

In a materialistic world, only the facts and figures are important. But facts and figures are determined by people. Reality is formulated by people. Our universe is what it is because being with consciousness feel and think inside it. This is now known to quantum mechanics, as it was known to Parmenides 2,500 years ago.

We used to listen to our heart.

Now we listen to the computers.

We used to be alive.

Now we are simply machines.

Listening to machines as the world becomes colder and colder.

The world will soon be empty, with no need for journalists at all…