OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has become a central force in the conversation about how artificial intelligence is transforming journalism. (Photo Illustration by Klaudia Radecka/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
PHOENIX – The future is here. Artificial intelligence will be present in our lives, whether the world is ready or not. Some say the technology is rising to the same level as the invention of the Internet when it comes to the possible impact on human lives.
The journalism industry has already begun to feel the effects of AI, and undoubtedly it will be integrated more and more. But here are the questions: Is AI dangerous to the future of journalism or will it be turned into a tool that can assist journalists to push their work even further?
The release of Open AI’s ChatGPT in November 2022 brought the usage of AI to the mainstream, dividing the opinion among society on whether the technology was a useful or dangerous new tool.
Retha Hill, the executive director of the New Media Innovation and Entrepreneurship Lab at Arizona State University, believes we are experiencing the early stages of the Gartner Hype Cycle in ChatGPT’s development. The Gartner Hype Cycle maps the life cycle of a new technology’s inception through mainstream adoption.
“It was the release of ChatGPT. People get super hyper excited about it,” Hill said. “Look I can make a frog dancing on the moon or that kind of thing and then after a while it is like this is just not good. This is terrible. There are all kinds of problems with that and you enter what they call the trough of disillusionment where people think AI is harmful, AI is not worth it.
“But after that, there’s usually a group of people and journalist technologists who see how you can use AI to create real value.”
As early as 2017, the Washington Post announced it was using automated storytelling to cover high school football. The Gannett media company has seen many of its properties toy with AI, including AZCentral, with mixed results. The Columbus Dispatch suspended its AI-generated local sports stories in 2023 after articles were criticized for sounding dry and lacking names.
One publication that took advantage of AI to create real value, the San Francisco Chronicle, created a bot it calls “Chowbot,” which uses AI to help tourists visiting San Francisco easily find restaurants.
“It’s a rival to Yelp,” Hill said. “If you’re visiting San Francisco and you want to get some really good clam chowder, you can go to Yelp and you might get some reviews for a place written by people who don’t know clam chowder. They could be from parts from the world or the country where they don’t know clam chowder, it’s all good to them as long as it tastes like seafood, or you can go go to ‘Chowbot’ and you can search for that same type of restaurant and they’re going to give you recommendations of really good places in San Francisco to get extremely delicious clam chowder that has a history in the atmosphere of the city that will be more memorable.”
AI is currently being used to help create media, but it’s not at the stage to become its own journalist through reporting and writing.
Jake Garcia, a sports multimedia journalist and sports anchor at NBC 12 News in Phoenix, made his rise to becoming a journalist in the era of AI’s birth. He believes that though there are benefits to using AI to help, aspiring journalists shouldn’t rely on the tool to learn journalistic skills.
“ChatGPT is really good at synthesizing a large amount of information that already exists and boiling it down to the basics so say you have a 300-page document, a lawsuit that’s taking place in, and you need to quickly learn what this lawsuit is about,” he said. “ChatGPT is really good about taking existing information and whittling it down to something that’s understandable and digestible. Where it’s not good at and where I think we need to be super cautious is creating original content. If you ask ChatGPT write a 2,000-word feature story on this athlete from scratch, it’s not going to look good and there is going to be a lot of errors, so I think journalists need to be like super cautious of that, but also understand that it can be a tool that’s used to condense our workflow.”
Bill Eichenberger, executive director of the Associated Press Sports Editors and an editor at Sportico, believes that the journalism industry needs to embrace AI and its capabilities early rather than fearing it and refusing to adapt to the changing technology. He warns that failing to adapt, like many news organizations did during the rise of the internet, could lead to missed opportunities and lasting consequences.
“I’m old enough to remember when the Internet became a thing,” Eichenberger said. “Newspapers were so slow to embrace it and they totally mishandled how to monetize it. I don’t want to see newspapers making the same mistake with the rise of artificial intelligence, so we have to embrace it. It’s the future, it’s unbelievably efficient.”
A staple of the sports journalism field is the classic Associated Press recap story. Currently, the postgame stories are written by human journalists, but Eichenberger believes that AI could make this task redundant for a human to write.
“Even game stories are being written by AI, it can do that and it is hard to tell that it’s not written by a person,” Eichenberger said. “If it was a game that I had seen, I probably could tell. But if it’s an account of a game that I didn’t see that is just the basics, I probably could not tell.”
AI will also reshape the way digital websites are built, making layout design, SEO and personalization easier for those who produce websites. NBC 12 News has already begun to implement the tool into its website.
“On our website, there are now mechanisms in the central content management system that allow us to generate headlines,” Garcia said. “It can create quick descriptions and potentially even full text through the use of AI. Now there are guard rails in place that our company specifies you know these tools are at your disposal, we don’t want you generating you know entire pieces of storytelling and in an article.”
AI is something to be cautious about when it comes to the ways in which you decide to use it. It also delivers us tools that will make our lives more efficient.
While AI is here to stay, many believe the goal is not to replace journalists, but to help them.
“AI can feed you or can kill you just like a fork,” Hill said. “I am not afraid. I do have concerns like most people but I think by talking about their concerns and putting guard rails around the things that could be most dangerous that’s the way you do it, as opposed to saying ‘nope nope nope, keep that outta here. Don’t wanna know about it, don’t want to use it, don’t wanna hear about it.’ I think that’s shortsighted.”