“The company said it was approving a number of AI programs for editorial and product staff, including GitHub Copilot programming assistant for coding, Google’s Vertex AI for product development, NotebookLM, the NYT’s ChatExplorer, some Amazon AI products, and OpenAI’s non-ChatGPT API through the New York Times’ business account (only with approval from the company’s legal department).”
– Max Tani
The New York Times has told its editorial staff they may a suite of AI tools in their work and is supplementing third-party software with an internal AI tool called Echo. The paper has also provided a collection of asscociated traning document and example use cases for AI in Times journalism.
Semafor reports Times staff have been given a list of constraints when using AI, including to “not use AI to draft or significantly revise an article, input third party copyrighted materials (particularly confidential source information), use AI to circumvent a paywall, or publish machine-generated images or videos, except to demonstrate the technology and with proper labeling. “
The Times is still pursuing a copyright lawsuit with OpenAI, the maker of the ChatGPT series of generative AI models.
New York Times goes all-in on internal AI tools | SEMAFOR | February 17, 2025 | by Max Tani