Article: Has AI Changed Journalism Forever?

Photo Source: Unsplash

Artificial intelligence, or AI, continues to impact every aspect of society, from medicine to commerce, science, and engineering. Creative people develop AI systems to improve or speed up tasks such as summarizing large amounts of text for legal briefings or automating the identification of cavities in dental X-rays. Each specific tool developed for a task can have a local impact, such as saving time or money, but sometimes a tool can have beneficial knock-on effects not envisioned by the developers who made it.  Large Language Models (or LLMs) such as that of ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, or Bing’s AI, have upended the faces of many jobs, including journalists.

While it was only recently that text generation has hit the mass populace, newsrooms have been aware of AI’s use for a long time now. The Associated Press in 2014 decided to use AI to generate financial reports on companies using publicly available information. The decision to use robo-journalists allowed AP to generate reports just hours after earnings announcements and to increase their coverage from 400 companies to nearly 2,500 companies. Researchers at Sanford and the University of Washington noted this shift. They seized the opportunity to test the market effects of this expansion of coverage of smaller companies with a median market cap of $250 million. (gsb.stanford.edu) They looked at the market performance of companies that AP had not covered before and found an average 11% gain in trading volume two days after earnings with the robo-reports. The authors believed that this increase in volume in trading occurred because these smaller companies caught the attention of investors who would not have noticed them before the robo-reports were generated. The authors also noted that the market got stronger and more efficient with more trading across the board.

In journalism, the discussion of using AI to generate news stories has sparked heated debate, especially in the field of ethics. The sporting magazine Sports Illustrated recently came under fire for using AI to create articles and attribute them to fake authors. (futurism.com) The finding infuriated staff and readers alike, leading to the removal of AI-generated articles. While Sports Illustrated denies these claims, authors such as those in the Futurism article believe otherwise. Sports Illustrated is not the only one accused, either, as the article also mentions publications such as Gizmodo and BuzzFeed also publishing AI-generated articles while passing them up as being written by actual people. This can cause the public’s trust in publications to grow even more strained than it already is. On the other hand, some may put too much trust into AI generation. In fact, in 2023 a student reached out to The Guardian about an article written by one of their journalists (theguardian.com). The trouble was that the article had been a hallucination by ChatGPT.

            In one interesting case, a local newspaper has found a way to use AI to its advantage. As reported in The Guardian, Newsquest, a media group that publishes over 200 titles (many of them local newspapers) has been implementing AI in its journalistic practices. (theguardian.com) Journalists use an artificial intelligence tool based on ChatGPT to generate news articles. They input information that they have found and use the artificial intelligence as a copyrighter. The idea is that while AI is generating the information, this frees local journalists up to go out and actually collect the local news. The heads at Newsquest seem to insist that it’s only a matter of time until that AI-assisted journalism becomes mundane.

            Like many industries, journalism has been further changed by the introduction of AI-generated content. It isn’t just the use of AI, as the Associated Press has been using it for nearly a decade to create earnings announcements. Its more widespread use has sparked controversy over its utility and its ethical usage (including if it’s ethical at all to use it). Companies like Newsquest insist that AI isn’t out to replace journalism but to enhance it (or at least AI will inevitably assimilate into journalism, whether journalism wants to or not), but publications such as Futurist have uncovered multiple instances of undisclosed AI journalism disguised as human articles. The latter begs to question whether the former’s statement will pan out. It isn’t even a perfect technology yet, as AI is still liable to make mistakes or hallucinate articles that aren’t real. It is important to deliberate over these questions and to use these answers to pave a path for ethical journalism in the emergent age of AI.

Dr. Smith’s career in scientific and information research spans the areas of bioinformatics, artificial intelligence, toxicology, and chemistry. He has published a number of peer-reviewed scientific papers. He has worked over the past seventeen years developing advanced analytics, machine learning, and knowledge management tools to enable research and support high-level decision making. Tim completed his Ph.D. in Toxicology at Cornell University and a Bachelor of Science in chemistry from the University of Washington.

You can buy his book on Amazon in paperback and in kindle format here.