News companies balance trust and efficiency with AI tools

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

While this technology could speed up the writing process, the quality of the information—and therefore the reader’s trust in it—would likely suffer.

The use of AI in the information industry has so far been limited mainly to research, facilitating the search for online materials and compiling data from the Internet.

“Nobody has a good example of generative AI doing original reporting,” said Jeremy Gilbert, a professor and media strategist at Northwestern University who has spent the past 15 years studying how AI can benefit journalism.

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

News organizations are already experimenting with different ways to use AI to reach broader audiences and increase newsroom efficiency, said Alex Mahadevan, director of the Poynter Institute’s MediaWise program.

For example, the Washington Post has a chatbot called Climate Answers. Readers can ask questions and the chatbot will search relevant Washington Post articles to provide AI-generated answers.

The New York Times and the Atlantic are using AI voices to read long articles aloud, Mahadevan said, and USA Today generates bullet-point summaries of articles using the technology.

“We see news organizations using this to make their content more accessible to a wider audience,” he said.

Other news organizations are using AI to search data faster, classify images and video, and optimize headlines for search engines, Mahadevan said.

He added that it is impossible to predict what direction this technology will take in the future.

One possibility, Mahadevan said, is to use artificial intelligence to create news packages for specific users. Users could specify their preferred medium and areas of interest to receive content tailored to their needs, he said.

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

However, the creation of real news materials using AI remains extremely limited.

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

They also use AI to create limited content, writing corporate earnings reports and creating previews and recaps of sporting events for most professional sports leagues.

AP scores for sports like baseball, football and basketball, for example, are created with AI by using statistics that teams or their leagues post online. When a large corporation posts its earnings report on a website, the AI ​​can gather that information and generate a summary of the report for AP readers in much less time than it would take a human reporter.

TribLive editors are just beginning to explore using AI-powered tools to improve their newsgathering process.

“We continue to explore the responsible use of AI tools to help develop content,” said editor-in-chief Luis Fabregas. “That said, we are committed to producing journalism of the highest standards, which means we do not publish stories or images generated by AI. We do this because we value accuracy and originality.”

Switch Sports, an online sports production and broadcasting company, helps provide live action from all the major professional leagues. Broadcasters licensed to cover the sports leagues can receive game coverage, analysis, and even live video feeds from the company and stream or broadcast games without having to bring an entire production crew into the event.

Anthony Desanti, executive producer on The Switch, said the technology helps him write real-time commentary for games and get real-time statistical analysis. Other aspects of AI improve the quality of videos and photos.

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

This explosion is generating real concern among news organizations as they strive to remain relevant in today’s technology-driven world.

“Many newsrooms are experimenting with AI because they don’t want to be left behind, the way many felt when they moved from print or broadcast to digital,” Gilbert said. “It’s important for newsrooms to experiment now, before audience tastes change in ways that could make it harder to rebuild.”

As Knight Chair in Digital Media Strategy at Northwestern Medill, Gilbert conducts experiments at the university’s Knight Lab on digital media to explore new ways to use artificial intelligence in journalism.