Publisher Gannett plans to include generative artificial intelligence in the system it uses to publish stories as it and other news organizations begin to implement popular technology that can help save money and improve efficiency.
But the largest US newspaper publisher with more than 200 daily publications said it will include humans in the process so the technology can’t be deployed automatically, without supervision. Generative AI is a way to create efficiencies and eliminate some tedious tasks for journalists, Renn Turiano, Gannett’s senior vice president and head of product, said in a recent interview with Reuters.
However, Turiano added, “the desire to go fast was a mistake by some of the other news services,” he said without pointing to a specific outlet. “We’re not making that mistake.”
Gannett is not alone in his balancing act. For example, Reuters Chairman Paul Bascobert said in a statement on Thursday, responding to a reporter’s request to comment on the company’s plans, that as the news agency embraces AI technologies, it is ” taking a responsible approach that safeguards accuracy and fosters trust.”
Many newsrooms in the US are trying to find the best way to incorporate AI tools that generate new content or data in response to a user prompt or question.
But the limitations of generative AI, which include a tendency to “blunder” or present misinformation with a semblance of certainty, are particularly problematic in an industry that demands precision, some experts say.
“At this time, I would not recommend these models for any journalistic use case where you automatically post to a public channel,” said Northwestern University associate professor Nicholas Diakopoulos.
Gannett’s strategy reflects the measured approach several mainstream newsrooms are taking.
Their caution follows highly publicized generative AI bugs in the media, including CNET and Men’s Journal. Both publications used technology to generate stories that contained factual errors.
Next quarter, Gannett will launch a live pilot using AI to identify the most important points in an article and create summaries with bullets at the top. It will launch that feature in the fourth quarter in USA Today. Journalists will have the last word, deciding whether to use what the AI proposes. Gannett will eventually incorporate that summary technology into its posting system.
Gannett journalists are fighting to make sure technology doesn’t replace them. Hundreds walked off the job due to staff cuts and stagnant wages on June 5. Generative AI is a sticking point in some negotiations with the company, the union said.
“The concern besides seeing our colleagues replaced is that we don’t think it’s a suitable replacement,” said Ilana Keller, a journalist for the Asbury Park Press in New Jersey.
A company spokesperson said that the use of AI will not replace journalists and that it is being used as a tool to help them be more efficient and focus on creating more valuable content.
Last year, Gannett, which is $1.23 billion (roughly Rs. 10,07,500 crore) in debt from its 2019 merger with GateHouse, laid off more than 600 employees. But its cost reduction has made it profitable.
not there yet
As part of its push, Gannett is also developing a generative AI tool that would take long stories and split them into various lengths and formats, like bullet points or captions on photos to create a slideshow.
To summarize their stories, Gannett relies on Cohere, a Microsoft-backed OpenAI competitor, which developed the ChatGPT chatbot. Gannett spent two weeks training Cohere’s big language model on 1,000 previously published stories with summaries written by his reporters.
To further train the model, journalists from USA Today’s political team reviewed and edited automated summaries and highlights.
While most news organizations have long relied on some form of artificial intelligence to do things like recommend and personalize content, new developments in generative AI are reigniting industry interest.
Gannett has also experimented with natural language generation (NLG), a form of artificial intelligence that builds a text narrative around real data, creating a story. It doesn’t “think” like generative AI. Journalists review stories before they are published.
Other media outlets are approaching generative AI with varying levels of commitment and caution. The New York Times and the Washington Post are in the planning phase, according to a Times memo seen by Reuters and a Washington Post announcement.
Bloomberg, which competes with Reuters, is developing its own generative artificial intelligence model, BloombergGPT, which it trained on financial data.
The New York Times, Washington Post and Bloomberg declined to provide additional comment on their plans.
Reuters is using AI for speech-to-text transcription to produce scripts and subtitles for videos, for example, but is not publishing AI-generated stories, videos or photos, according to a May message to staff from editor-in-chief Alessandra. Galloni on the AI guide for Reuters journalists.
BBC News Labs, the station’s innovation incubator, is testing whether it can semi-automate the generation of short explanations.
For those stories, BBC News Labs built a prototype that is based on previously published pieces of BBC content and uses the ChatGPT-3 model to write it. “It could never get anywhere near an audience unless a journalist manually pulled it out,” said Miranda Marcus, director of BBC News Labs.
“There’s a whole different universe of what kinds of stories we can tell with these tools,” added Marcus. “But we’re not there yet.”
© Thomson Reuters 2023
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is automatically generated from a syndicated feed.)
