AI In The News: Some AI Tools Are Making Newsrooms More Efficient; Others Are Generating Incorrect Headlines And News Summaries, Presenting New Information Literacy Challenges

Abstract

In December, the BBC lodged a complaint with the company after Apple Intelligence cited a report from the news organization claiming that Luigi Mangione—the man arrested for the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson—had shot himself. Use of the tool has since expanded into coverage of other data-heavy stories including economic reports, election results, stock market trends, weather reports, and more. [...]in 2014 the Associated Press (AP) began using natural language generation technology from Automated Insights paired with data from Zacks Investment Research to boost its coverage of earnings reports from 300 to over 4,000 each quarter. In "Generating Change: A global survey of what news organisations are doing with AI" by Prof. Charlie Beckett, leader of the London School of Economics' (LSE) JournalismAI project, and Mira Yaseen, lead researcher for JournalismAI—the report covering the survey results—respondents say they are using generative AI for a variety of tasks, including email composition, generating infographics or article summaries for their organization's social media channels and newsletters, brainstorming, rephrasing sentences, evaluating content quality, creating headline suggestions, repurposing content for different audiences, detecting biases, and search engine optimization.