AI comes for journalism

Happy Friday, it’s Rachel in San Francisco. How important is it to you that a human writes the news you read? But first...Today’s must-reads [View in browser]( [Bloomberg]( Happy Friday, it’s Rachel in San Francisco. How important is it to you that a human writes the news you read? But first... Today’s must-reads: • Amazon jolted investors with talk of a [cloud growth slowdown]( • Snap reported its first-ever [decline in quarterly revenue](; shares plunged • Mark Zuckerberg’s [wealth soared]( by more than $10 billion on Thursday Stop the presses Like most people, I still tend to think abstractly about the ways that artificial intelligence is impacting our world for better and worse. But the topic got more personal for me this week when I moderated a panel for the San Francisco Press Club about [AI and journalism]( and talked to a bunch of other writers about how the technology is changing our profession. As generative AI tools like OpenAI’s DALL-E and ChatGPT become increasingly popular, creating lifelike images and human-like text respectively, newsrooms and individual journalists have been forced to quickly adapt. We’ve had to figure out if and how and when to use this new wave of AI products at the same time as the general public, and have raced to come up with policies about whether to disclose such things to readers. It doesn’t help that our tumultuous industry is facing waves of layoffs, which can force reporters who are still employed to feel that they need to do more with fewer resources. All this was top of mind Tuesday evening, when I asked journalists from outlets including Reuters, Wired and Agence France-Presse to explain how they’re approaching AI. One panelist’s response in particular caught me by surprise. VentureBeat’s editorial director, Michael Nuñez, explained that the tech blog is using Microsoft Corp.’s OpenAI-infused Bing Chat to help with editing and writing articles. “I think of it as like having another person on the team,” he said, noting that as an editor, he can use the chatbot to process and summarize information in seconds rather than the hours it might take a human reporter. “I’m not trying to take a press release, feed it through the system, and get an article, although I can probably do that,” he said. Nuñez thinks the debate over whether to use small pieces of text written by a machine will be short-lived. “If you’re taking sentences or clauses or small fragments of ideas from the large language model — in my view, we’re going to be discussing it for six months — and I guarantee, in two years, it’s not going to matter.” Nuñez said VentureBeat is encouraging reporters to use the powerful AI tools that are currently available, and doesn’t attribute an article with “sentences and fragments” from a chatbot “as long as it’s truthful” and independently verified. “I don’t think our readers care, to be totally honest,” he said. “Tweet that out, if you want.” I spent a lot of time afterwards pondering what Nuñez said, particularly since it was just a few months ago that publications CNET and Men’s Journal had to correct a host of errors in AI-written articles. Journalists have naturally been experimenting with image and text generators, crafting [policies]( regarding how publications will and won’t use these forms of AI. There are still lots of unanswered questions. When, for example, is it appropriate for a publication to publish a generated image, no matter how benign it may appear? Can a chatbot help write a story? How transparent should a publication be with its readers about how it’s using AI? I’m not sure that we have many answers yet, frankly. But it’s clear that bylines, source names, and disclosures help readers decide how much to trust information. This has become ever-more vital as misinformation and disinformation abounds. And let’s not forget that the newest chatbots and image generators are making it easier than ever to produce plausible-looking fakes. Such disclosures may matter doubly to me because I’m both a reader and a reporter, but I imagine that I’m not alone in wanting to know who – or what – authored the news I’m reading. As AI capabilities race ahead, outlets of all stripes should redouble efforts to make sure their audiences have the full picture. (And yes, I wrote this entire newsletter myself.) —[Rachel Metz](mailto:rmetz17@bloomberg.net) The big story Europe’s most valuable tech company, ASML, is at the heart of the US-China chip war. Here’s [how the low-profile firm]( became crucial to a half-trillion-dollar global industry. Get fully charged An Ohio man photographed lounging in a bathtub full of dollar bills must serve [four years in prison]( for stealing 713 Bitcoin. The New York City subway system is ending its Twitter service alerts after the Elon Musk-owned company asked for [$50,000 a month]( to continue accessing the platform’s application programming interface. 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