I've read Automated Insights automated summaries of fantasy football games for yahoo. If that is indicative of their capabilities, then the role of human writers looks to be secure for some time to come.
As the person at Automated Insights who writes most of our blog posts and white papers, I agree that human writers are essential! Typically, our software does jobs humans either can't do (it's not practical for humans to write millions of fantasy recaps per week) or don't want to do (when AP announced it would use our software to automate corporate earnings stories, reporters who had done that job manually were the most excited).
There are some kinds of stories this can work for - ie, the earthquake bot - but this is not a good general solution. Modern users are sensitive to low-quality content writing as an indicator of product quality. Crappy writing is spam, high-quality writing in an authentic voice is someone worth listening to.
I'm not staking out the claim that this will never be possible, but I've yet to see it executed well.
From my experience these types of programs frequently don't work for the same reason outsourcing articles to non-native-English writers often doesn't work -- most times, the end results don't "read" like a native English speaker wrote them, making it so only someone with English as a second or third language wouldn't notice the various awkward phrasings, etc. English is extremely tricky. If these programs do catch on, either we'll need more editors, or we'll move to a different, more creole form of global English (which I doubt).
It's certainly not a totally new attempt. But as a former journalist turned tech marketer, it's pretty fascinating. Especially the illustration of earnings announcement (pretty formulaic, but with SEC sensitivities... wow). A while back I saw a study from Medill (Northwestern) about how robots were writing newspaper style sports game stories -- also fascinating, but I don't know any sports fans that read game stories any more.
