用人工智能“私人订制”的新闻，靠谱吗？

用人工智能“私人订制”的新闻，靠谱吗？

作为一家近年来发展迅速的新闻平台，今日头条一直标榜运用智能后台为用户挑选符合其偏好的新闻内容。而针对近来引起话题的虚假新闻的问题，他们称拥有人工团队对新闻信息来源进行筛查。

测试中可能遇到的词汇和知识：

aggregation聚合，聚集[,æɡrɪ'ɡeɪʃən]

triumvirate 三头统治[traɪ'ʌmvɪrət]

voracious贪婪的；贪吃的[və'reɪʃəs]

portal大门，入口 ['pɔːt(ə)l]

beef up加强（增援，充实）

algorithm算法，运算法则['ælgərɪð(ə)m]

prominent突出的，显著的['prɒmɪnənt]

Toutiao touts AI for individual news in vast China market（793 words）

By Emily Feng in Beijing

Every day, in a former Beijing aeroplane factory that is now the headquarters of Jinri Toutiao, servers sort and tag some 200,000 articles and videos that the mobile app's users will consume that day.

With nearly 600m users, five-year-old Toutiao has overtaken traditional and state-owned media to become a significant channel through which the world's most populous country gets its news. Meaning “Today's Headlines”, Jinri Toutiao is also one of China's most valuable tech start-ups, valued at $11bn after its latest Series D funding round led by Sequoia Capital last month. That is more than 20 times its $500m valuation in 2014, sparking a debate over the worth of what is essentially a news aggregation app.

While Toutiao hosts content but does not produce it, it maintains it has a key selling point in its “intelligent news feed”, where artificial intelligence and machine learning software tailor content.

“We strive to become the information platform that knows each individual best,” Tina Zhao, vice-president, said in an interview. “No two users' feed lists are alike.”

It is betting that a personalised user experience will give it an edge over its competitors — the tech triumvirate of Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent.

“Back in the days when Toutiao was born, the Chinese information market was dominated by web portals like Sina and Sohu. Their mobile products were simply moving content from web to mobile, and user experience … was not good enough,” said Ms Zhao.

Founded in 2012 by Zhang Yiming, a former software engineer, Toutiao has grown rapidly in the past year. Its number of daily active users rose from 30m to 78m in 2016 — making it the tenth most-used app in China — as it capitalised on voracious demand for interesting content, in a country still dominated by state-owned media.

“We are not like other news portals which provide news with a certain position. Rather, we are a neutral platform, providing news to every person depending on what they are interested in,” said Mr Zhang, in a 2015 interview with Chinese media.

Toutiao's readers can browse Chinese-language news, commentary and video sourced from 4,000 partnerships, which the company says it has forged with both state-owned and independent media organisations, including Xinhua and Caixin.

Sina Weibo, one of China's largest social media platforms, invested $100m in Toutiao in 2014 and now publishes non-news content by verified bloggers directly to Toutiao's app.

To beef up its news-sorting algorithms, Toutiao has aggressively poached engineering talent. In February, it hired Ma Wei-Ying, the former assistant managing director of Microsoft Research Asia, to lead its AI Lab.

Yet some of Toutiao's investors have expressed concern over how solely providing content can sustain long-term growth.

“We are still undecided about ‘new media’ firms. They build audience and popularity through third-party mega-platforms but are not really building something on their own. They are dependent on the mega-platform,” said Anita Huang, a managing partner at Beijing-based Sinovation Ventures.

Nearly all of Toutiao's revenue comes from advertising. The company said it earned Rmb6bn ($869m) last year from in-app advertisements and aims to increase that to Rmb10bn by 2020.

“The value of Toutiao is indeed overestimated for a platform without original content,” wrote Zhang Luoyang, a prominent online tech commentator. “Toutiao's 600m user base has pretty much found all of China's 680m internet users. To make only Rmb6bn in advertisements, despite having so many users, means its margins are extremely low and dependent on one source, so it must create more value within its own services.

That has prompted Toutiao to seek additional sources of revenue abroad and to explore other service areas.

In February, it bought Los Angeles-based video app Flipagram, an Instagram rival, for an undisclosed amount, and has taken controlling stakes in several Indonesian and Indian media apps. A partnership with Chinese ecommerce platform JD.com enables users to browse and purchase directly JD.com products featured within the Toutiao app.

Toutiao also has made a big push into hosting user-created content. Last year, it said it would invest $1bn in video streaming and now allows anyone to set up a channel on Toutiao to post non-news content.

Meanwhile, media professionals and investors worry that Toutiao could encounter the problems of algorithm bias and fake news that have entangled social media platforms such as Facebook. Toutiao employs “human intelligence” teams to screen for dubious content and refine its algorithms but analysts say a personalised news source runs the danger of becoming too narrow.

Lou Meijing, an analyst at iiMedia, a Beijing media consultancy group, said: “There is this problem of creating a filter bubble from a news source based on an algorithm and what our friends recommend, so that what we read further creates an even more subjective, more biased stream of information.”