Is reading market reaction to news actually something only humans can do?

Been day trading for a few months. A more experienced trader told me the real skill isn't getting news fast, it's reading how the market reacts to it.

Like earnings drop 10% but the stock goes up because expectations were worse. Or bad news hits and nothing moves. His point was that this kind of judgment requires you to be there, feel the tape, use experience. Can't be automated.

I get it. But I keep wondering if that's still true or if it just used to be.

Because the market's reaction to news is ultimately price and volume data, which is totally quantifiable. The real problem was always that news itself had no structure. You couldn't tell a program whether something was bullish or bearish because the same headline means completely different things depending on context.

That part feels a lot more solvable now though. AI can actually understand tone and context in text, and there are tools built around this already, like Benzinga's API or Polygon's news feed, that tag tickers and sentiment automatically. But they're either expensive or pretty limited. I recently came across one called TradingNews API that does similar things and is way cheaper, and I've been thinking about using it to actually test this.

So am I wrong? Has anyone actually tried trasystematically and found a system just can'tlearn it? Or is the "you need a human" thing just conventional wisdom nobody's really pressure tested?

Would love to hear from people who've been doing this longer than me.