Saturday, November 2, 2024

News companies walk fine line of trust versus efficiency with AI tools AI

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This story was not written using artificial intelligence, but it could have been.

Although the technology might have sped up the writing process, the quality of the information — and the trust the reader has in it — likely would have suffered.

Use of AI in the news industry, so far, largely is restricted to research, making stories more searchable online and compiling data from the internet.

“No one has a good example of generative AI doing original reporting,” said Jeremy Gilbert, a Northwestern University professor and media strategist who has spent the last 15 years looking at the question of how AI can benefit journalism.

But that doesn’t mean journalists aren’t using AI. As the technology grows and advances, more uses for it are being found in the news industry.

News agencies already are experimenting with a variety of ways to use artificial intelligence to reach broader audiences and make newsrooms more efficient, said Alex Mahadevan, director of the Poynter Institute’s MediaWise program.

For example, the Washington Post has a chatbot called Climate Answers. Readers can pose questions, and the chatbot will comb through relevant Washington Post stories to provide AI-generated answers.

The New York Times and the Atlantic use AI voices to read long stories aloud, Mahadevan said, and USA Today generates bulleted summaries of its stories using the technology.

“What you’re seeing are news organizations leveraging it to make their content more palatable to a wider audience,” he said.

Other news outlets are using artificial intelligence to more quickly scan through data, classify images and video and optimize headlines for search engines, Mahadevan said.

Where the technology will go in the future, he said, is impossible to predict.

One possibility, Mahadevan said, is artificial intelligence could be used to craft news packages for specific users. A user could specify their preferred medium and areas of interest to receive content catered to them, he said.

“I think the biggest promise that AI holds is personalizing all of our great reporting that we do in ways that will reach new audiences, that will make them care about what’s happening,” he said.

The creation of actual news stories with AI, however, remains extremely limited.

The Associated Press, for example, has been a leading and transparent proponent for the use of AI in news production, relying on the technology to tag content for search and help predict where photographers can get the best photos for news events.

They also use AI for limited story creation, using it for writing corporate earnings reports and creating sports previews and recaps for most professional sports leagues.

AP box scores for sports such as baseball, football and basketball, for example, are produced via AI by tapping into stats put out by teams or their leagues on the internet. When a major corporation publishes its earnings report to a website, AI can cull that information and produce a summary of the report for AP readers in far less time than it would have taken a human reporter.

At TribLive, newsroom editors are in the early stages of exploring how AI tools can be used to streamline the news gathering process.

“We continue to explore the responsible use of AI tools to assist in the development of content,” said executive editor Luis Fabregas. “That said, we are committed to producing journalism of the highest standards, which means that we don’t publish stories or photos generated by AI. We do that because we value accuracy and originality.”

The Switch Sports, an online and broadcast sports event production company, helps provide live game action from all major professional leagues. Broadcasters licensed to cover the sports leagues can pick up play-by-play, analysis or even live video feeds from the company and stream or broadcast games without committing a full production crew to the event.

Anthony Desanti, executive producer at The Switch, said the technology helps him write copy for game announcers in real time and receive real-time statistical analysis. Other aspects of AI improve the quality of video and photographs.

“This is only the tip of the iceberg. AI is exploding,” Desanti said.

That explosion creates a real interest in news organizations striving to stay relevant in today’s technology-driven climate.

“A lot of newsrooms are experimenting with artificial intelligence because they don’t want to be left behind, like many of them felt they were with the transition from print or broadcast to digital,” Gilbert said. “It’s important for newsrooms to experiment right now before the tastes of audiences have changed in ways that might make it hard to recover.”

As the Knight Chair in Digital Media Strategy at Northwestern Medill, Gilbert is running experiments through the school’s digital media Knight Lab to explore new ways of using AI in journalism.

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