For the longest time, the best use case I could conceive of for AI automating news writing was for financial and market stories -- pieces on quarterly earnings, stock movements, etc. 

But I just actually read one in an attempt to glean some real information and -- let me tell you -- an illiterate non-English speaker could have written a better and clearer story.  This is the most bullish I've felt on the future of human newswriting in a minute.

Reporter, writer and analyst. I cover energy, climate change and geopolitics. Contact me via my website www.alexanderckaufman.com and subscribe to kaufman.nyc.

AI should be more of backend augmentation for source-gathering, imho.

super-literate audiences are natural stylometrists, so automated writing would only work if the system was finetuned to a particular voice, and even then there's a tradeoff between being episodic/formulaic vs stream-of-consciousness.