So far, newsrooms have pursued two entirely different approaches to integrating the hottest new AI tool, ChatGPT, into their work. Tech news site CNET secretly started using ChatGPT to write an entire article, but the experiment went up in flames. Ultimately, a correction had to be issued in the plagiarism accusation. Buzzfeed, on the other hand, takes a more cautious and cautious approach. The reader wants to use ChatGPT to generate quiz answers guided by journalists who create topics and questions.
These stories boil down to a fundamental question facing many industries today: How much control should we give AI systems? While over, Buzzfeed’s more cautious (and transparent) approach to using ChatGPT as a productivity tool was generally well received, leading to a surge in its stock price.
But here’s the dirty secret of journalism. A surprising amount of information could be automated, says Charlie Beckett, a professor at the London School of Economics who runs a program called journalism AI. Journalists routinely reuse texts from news agencies and steal ideas for articles and sources from their competitors. It makes perfect sense for newsrooms to explore how new technologies can help make these processes more efficient.
“The idea that journalism is a flowerbed in which originality and creativity bloom is utter garbage,” says Beckett. (pain!)
not necessarily a bad thing If only we could outsource some of the boring and repetitive parts of journalism to AI. In fact, it could free up journalists to do more creative and important work.
one good example We’ve seen how ChatGPT can be used to repackage newswire text into the “smart breathability” format used by Axios. Chatbots seem to do it well enough, and you can imagine that any journalist in charge of imposing that format would be happy to have more time to do something fun.
This is just one example of how newsrooms can take advantage of AI. AI can also help journalists summarize long texts, comb through data sets, and come up with headline ideas. In the process of writing this newsletter, I used several AI tools myself, including word processor autocomplete and audio interview transcription.
However, the use of AI in newsrooms raises some major concerns. The main one is privacy. This is especially true for sensitive articles where it is imperative to protect the identity of the source. This is a problem that MIT Technology Review journalists encountered with their audio transcription service, and sadly the only way around it is to manually transcribe sensitive interviews.
