None of the AI writers seems to have a specific beat, except possibly for what can be best described as “police exploits,” which they all cover with gusto.
“To describe one form of journalism as ‘fact-based’ is to tacitly acknowledge that there is also such a thing as ‘non-fact-based journalism.’ And there isn’t.”
None of the AI writers seems to have a specific beat, except possibly for what can be best described as “police exploits,” which they all cover with gusto.
“After conversations with several executives at different companies who have negotiated with OpenAI, I was left with the sense that the tech company is less interested in publisher data to train its models and far more interested in real-time access to news sites for OpenAI’s forthcoming search tools.”
“In several conversations, [Washington Post publisher and CEO Will] Lewis repeatedly — and heatedly — offered to give me an exclusive interview about the Post’s future, as long as I dropped the story about the allegations … That first interview appears to have gone to Puck’s Dylan Byers.”
HBR believes AI will help the media industry enter an age of hyper-personalization. The 102-year-old publication is also working on a chatbot to help readers “get ahead in their careers.” (Publications including San Francisco Chronicle have also debuted chatbots.)
“The new law also ends a requirement for towns to pay attorneys’ fees in court cases they lose over records requests. The last provision could make it prohibitively expensive for members of the public and news reporters to challenge local and state governments in court, according to the bill’s opponents, including civil rights groups, the state’s press association and dozens of others who testified at committee hearings this year.”
“The group, using funds raised last year from investors including CNN boss Mark Thompson and economist Diane Coyle, is aiming to double the size of its operations by the end of the year.”
“Bearing in mind we’re publishing 6,500 stories a year, most of them go to Facebook, so we’re probably doing ten to 15, maybe sometimes 15 to 20 stories a day to Facebook, and it happened to be a general election post that was taken down.”
Eliot Higgins, Bellingcat founder: “When a lot of people think about AI, they think, ‘Oh, it’s going to fool people into believing stuff that’s not true.’ But what it’s really doing is giving people permission to not believe stuff that is true. Because they can say, ‘Oh, that’s an AI-generated image. AI can generate anything now: video, audio, the entire war zone re-created.’ They will use it as an excuse. It’s just easy for them to say.”
The New York Times / Ben Mullin and Katie Robertson
“Sally Buzbee, the editor, informed Mr. Lewis that the newsroom planned to cover a judge’s scheduled ruling in a long-running British legal case brought by Prince Harry and others against some of Rupert Murdoch’s tabloids, the people said. As part of the ruling, the judge was expected to say whether the plaintiffs could add Mr. Lewis’s name to a list of executives who they argued were involved in a plan to conceal evidence of hacking at the newspapers. Mr. Lewis told Ms. Buzbee the case involving him did not merit coverage, the people said.”
Nieman Lab is a project to try to help figure out where the news is headed in the Internet age. Sign up for The Digest, our daily email with all the freshest future-of-journalism news.