The AP lays the groundwork for an AI-assisted newsroom

The Related Press printed requirements right this moment for generative AI use in its newsroom. The group, which has a licensing agreement with ChatGPT maker OpenAI, listed a reasonably restrictive and common sense list of measures across the burgeoning tech whereas cautioning its employees to not use AI to make publishable content material. Though nothing within the new pointers is especially controversial, much less scrupulous retailers might view the AP’s blessing as a license to make use of generative AI extra excessively or underhandedly.

The group’s AI manifesto underscores a perception that synthetic intelligence content material needs to be handled because the flawed instrument that it’s — not a alternative for skilled writers, editors and reporters exercising their finest judgment. “We don’t see AI as a alternative of journalists in any manner,” the AP’s Vice President for Requirements and Inclusion, Amanda Barrett, wrote in an article about its method to AI right this moment. “It’s the duty of AP journalists to be accountable for the accuracy and equity of the data we share.”

The article directs its journalists to view AI-generated content material as “unvetted supply materials,” to which editorial employees “should apply their editorial judgment and AP’s sourcing requirements when contemplating any data for publication.” It says workers could “experiment with ChatGPT with warning” however not create publishable content material with it. That features photographs, too. “In accordance with our requirements, we don’t alter any components of our pictures, video or audio,” it states. “Due to this fact, we don’t enable using generative AI so as to add or subtract any components.” Nonetheless, it carved an exception for tales the place AI illustrations or art are a narrative’s topic — and even then, it must be clearly labeled as such.

Barrett warns about AI’s potential for spreading misinformation. To forestall the unintended publishing of something AI-created that seems genuine, she says AP journalists “ought to train the identical warning and skepticism they’d usually, together with making an attempt to determine the supply of the unique content material, doing a reverse picture search to assist confirm a picture’s origin, and checking for stories with related content material from trusted media.” To guard privateness, the rules additionally prohibit writers from coming into “confidential or delicate data into AI instruments.”

Though that’s a comparatively common sense and uncontroversial algorithm, different media retailers have been much less discerning. CNET was caught early this yr publishing error-ridden AI-generated financial explainer articles (solely labeled as computer-made in case you clicked on the article’s byline). Gizmodo discovered itself in an identical highlight this summer season when it ran a Star Wars article full of inaccuracies. It’s not exhausting to think about different retailers — determined for an edge within the extremely aggressive media panorama — viewing the AP’s (tightly restricted) AI use as a inexperienced gentle to make robotic journalism a central determine of their newsrooms, publishing poorly edited / inaccurate content material or failing to label AI-generated work as such.