Narrative Science was founded in 2010 in Evanston, Illinois, after a student project in the Intelligent Information Lab at Northwestern University jump started the NLG technology.

[2] The first prototype of the company technology went by the project name StatsMonkey and was developed in the laboratory by Kris Hammond, Larry Birnbaum, Nick Allen and John Templon.

The company received some early criticism from journalists speculating that Narrative Science was attempting to eliminate the jobs of writers, particularly in sports and finance.

[23] A CBS article compared artificially generated journalism in the financial sector to the property market bubble, as it leads to “everyone making investments in the same way for the same reasons”.

[23] The article claimed that computer-generated narratives have the “potential to amplify biases and assumptions, but at far greater speed and on a far wider scale than anything written by humans.”[23] An article from the Columbia Journalism School also criticized the limitations of “robo-journalism” software, as “it can’t assess the damage on the ground, can’t interview experts, and can’t discern the relative newsworthiness of various aspects of the story” and therefore, lacks a necessary human element.