Artificial Intelligence (AI) cannot replace journalists. However, it can take care of repetitive tasks, allowing you to focus on what you do best: real journalism.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) cannot replace journalists. However, it can remove some of the tedious tasks so you can focus on what you do best: real journalism.
Summary
When it comes to artificial intelligence in the newsroom, journalists generally fall into two camps: those who have a little too much faith in the abilities of AI and those who would never use a machine learning tool.
ChatGPT, an AI-powered tool that has been trained to generate human-like responses, is increasingly on everyone’s lips. Some news organizations have even used it to write articles. However, this turned out to be really a terrible idea.
That doesn’t mean ChatGPT can’t be useful to journalists. As long as you’re clear about what it can and can’t do, the tool can help you with some menial tasks so you can focus on the stories that matter to your audience.
Limitations
When working with ChatGPT, keep in mind that it’s smart, but not that smart. It’s a machine with no intentions (it doesn’t want to help or mislead you), it has no concept of what is real, and it has no moral sense. In short: it generates text based on the vast amount of data it was trained on.
For this reason, you must absolutely fact-check everything it generates. ChatGPT will almost always answer your question, but if real information isn’t available, it might just make something up. Always check the math, names, and locations, and always make sure everything actually exists. After all, verification is something a journalist should never forget—regardless of artificial tools.
Here are some smart tasks where ChatGPT can help you.
1. Generating summaries of long texts and documents
ChatGPT is quite good at summarizing long pieces of text. This is useful when you need to quickly scan new reports, studies, and other documents. You can even ask the tool to give you the main points, pull a quote, or find information about the author or authors. Essentially, it’s an excellent synthesis tool.
2. Generating questions and answers
Useful when you’re working on an unfamiliar topic or looking for new perspectives. ChatGPT can help you research events, people, and pretty much anything else. As always, double-check everything that comes to mind while it merrily invents things it doesn’t know the answer to. For example, you can ask it to give you names of experts to interview on a specific topic, and it generally provides valid suggestions. However, if the topic is too niche, the tool might generate completely fictitious names that seem to be experts, for example, in a particular country.
3. Providing quotations
This needs to be checked carefully. You can ask ChatGPT to look up quotes from a particular person and it will probably find something. However, take extra time to verify where the quote comes from, as it might be the work of another writer—which would be plagiarism—or it could be made up.
4. Generating headlines
If you’re doing A/B tests, challenge your own headlines against artificial intelligence. You can ask it to make the headline funny, negative or positive, remove jargon, or turn it into a specific number of words. Unfortunately, ChatGPT really struggles with math: always count the words in the final result and ask it to rewrite if there’s an error (which there almost certainly will be).
5. Translating articles into different languages
Like any other AI-based translation tool, it’s very rough—and you might get a good laugh. However, it can be helpful if you just need a general idea of what a text says in another language. If you want something a bit more accurate, you’re better off sticking with Google Translate.
6. Generating email subjects and drafting emails
Outsourcing one of the dullest office tasks to a machine sounds like a dream. Even though you’ll have to edit the final version, ChatGPT can speed up the process of sending emails to your sources or colleagues, as you can generate a sound message with a quick prompt. Just fill in the blanks and send. A real time-saver.
7. Generating social media posts
Like with emails, posting on social media is useful but time-consuming. You can ask ChatGPT to write a tweet or a LinkedIn post about a topic, freeing up your time and brainpower for more valuable writing.
8. Providing context for articles
As with all the activities mentioned above, this one can also be inconsistent. You can ask ChatGPT to provide context on a news story, for example, why the railways are on strike this year, and it can find fairly accurate information. However, always double-check. It can also explain how something works, which can be useful if you need to add a brief explanation to your piece, in simple language.
Although many people fear that ChatGPT could be used to write articles, fortunately that’s not (yet) the case. Its writing is not human and it shows. ChatGPT cannot follow a breaking news event. It cannot detect when someone is not telling the truth and it cannot connect with another human being for an interview. The only way to use ChatGPT (at the moment) is in the way we have seen. After all, it’s an assistant, not a master.
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