While we, as webmasters, work on our content, writing and copyrighting skills there is an emerging aspect to doing that which we need to consider, soon.

I'm aware of the WW policy on displaying links, and that in some cases an exception is warranted, so I'm going to give a specific example for this article involving a current news event about a well established company that is obviously not mine but is in the news tonight. The news is that eBay has sold their enterprise division but, to me, the story is that a machine is breaking that news. I believe this example can further discussion on the subject.

Specific article on the Raleigh Durham news site: [wral.com...]

I picked this specific article/page because I see it trending in a couple of prominent locations, including on Google news. The footer of the article contains the text "Copyright 2015 by The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed" suggesting it was written by or for the associated press and was in fact redistributed on the news site.

More interestingly it also contains the following text within the article itself

Elements of this story were generated by Automated Insights (...) using data from Zacks Investment Research.

Automated insights essentially machine scours the internet to find different tidbits of information about a subject in order to automatically create sentences and paragraphs that, as you can see, can create a cohesive article. If you have no idea what Automated Insights is or what it's doing it's very likely you'd be fooled into thinking a human wrote the article at this point, it's becoming better at fooling people over time.

My question is this: Now that these articles are quite clearly able to land the most prominent spots in places like Google news and any major news outlet that reproduces well trusted associated press articles is it a matter of time before bots write the majority of news articles by dissecting and analyzing parts from different sources to create a new whole? Is it a good thing that sites which post automated articles can avoid being automatically rejected and removed from natural search rankings? Certainly the quality is better than your typical spun content but... it's still a bot.

What does this mean moving forward as a webmaster who takes pride in, and spends time researching first hand, what they publish? Should we all begin managing and improving our own bots so that we can output stories onto hundreds of sites in the time it takes us to write an article manually for one site? How can we tell where search engines draw the line between not enough bot and too much bot? These questions need to be answered now, the example is evidence of that.