AI and journalism — get up to speed!
Our head of professional development, Corinne Podger, has pulled together links to the latest research and a free online course on AI tools for journalists.
By Corinne Podger
If you’ve used a tool like Otter or Descript to transcribe interviews, send predictive text messaging, or called an Uber using Siri, you’re already using AI.
What’s new about recent tools like ChatGPT, MidJourney and so on — is that they are generative, rather than predictive.
Predictive tools analyse data to make predictions about a future event — such as the next word you’re likely to use in a sentence. Generative tools go a step further, because they use data — like a prompt sentence, or an online database — to create new content.
An example would be giving a prompt like “a cowboy wearing a tuxedo on the moon” to an image creation tool like Midjourney, as Lars Nielsen explains in this blog post:
Another example is prompting a tool like ChatGPT to write a story or opinion piece, or generate a spreadsheet. The more relevant the prompt, and the more reliable the underlying data, the better the end result.
That’s the idea, anyway, although it’s becoming increasingly clear that you should neither expect AI to generate accurate content nor publish AI-generated content made by a third party without fact-checking it.
Understanding the basics
International Journalism Festival Sessions
There were five sessions on AI at the International Journalism Festival, and a good place to start your learning journey is this IJF session, Generative AI in the Newsroom, which covers the evolution of AI from predictive to generative, and how the latest tools work.
Journalism AI Discovery Course
You can also sign up to a free introductory online course starting 13 June, which is being run by the Journalism AI Lab at London School of Economics in the UK. Register here.
Symposium in Sydney / Online
The Centre of Excellence in Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S) is hosting a two-day Symposium on Automated News & Media on 13–14 July. The program and link to register are here.
How newsrooms are using AI
This week the World Association of Newspaper Editors (WAN-IFRA) published a global survey of member newsrooms. The survey found around half the respondents are already using AI tools like ChatGPT.
Around 75 percent of respondents said AI tools are helping to speed up tasks like research and producing news summaries, and supporting personalisation. Concerns about AI included accuracy, copyright infringement, privacy, and job losses.
Closer to home, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism hosted a webinar last week looking at the use of AI in newsrooms in Asia, and you can watch the recording here:
Developing newsroom policies on AI
The WAN-IFRA survey also found only one in five newsrooms have formal guidelines on when and how to use AI tools.
If you identify with the other 80 percent, you might find these resources useful — both in developing an internal AI policy, and in communicating that policy to your audience:
- MEAA policy position on AI (23 March 2023)
- Letter from the editor on generative AI and the FT — an open letter published 27 May 2023 by the Financial Times in the UK, to readers and subscribers
