A Chinese robot reporter at Toutiao News managed to produce 450 Olympic-related news articles over the two weeks of the Rio 2016 games.

The AI writing robot dubbed as Xiaomingbot managed to produce between 30 and 40 pieces per day.  Its artificial intelligence relied on the Olympics database to search for real-time results, according to Futurism. Its write-ups usually run around 100 words, but it is capable of writing longer stories, with its longest piece with 821 words.

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The robot reporter, which was developed by Peking University and Toutiao, was designed to produce faster results compared with other reporters or AI and publish stories with photos included.

While the robot reporter produces more articles and publishes faster, critics said that its news content is too robotic.

"'China's Wang won' is too robotic, it should be 'Wang claimed the victory,' okay? The wording is bad," an online critic said, commenting on Xiaomingbot's report on a Badminton Women's Singles games won by Wang Yihan. The news came out just two minutes after the game ended and had more than 50,000 views.

According to Quartz, although Peking University claimed that Xiaomingbot is the first Chinese AI machine to report in the Olympics, it is not the only AI. The Washington Post also has Heliograf, which produced shorts reports including the games' schedules, results and medal tallies on Twitter.

A WeChat post that compared both robot reporters criticized Heliograf's mechanical form of writing and praised Xiaomingbot's writing style, saying "Chinese player Xiaomingbot inspires national pride and crushed competitor Heliograf across the Pacific Ocean."

TagsAI, Artificial Intelligence, robot reporter, Robots, Xiaomingbot, Rio, Rio 2016, Rio Olympics 2016, Heliograf, The Washington Post