Posted in AI in the newsroom Ethics

What Reuters is telling its journalists about using artificial intelligence | TALKING BIZ NEWS

“. . .exploring the possibilities afforded by the new generation of tools is not optional – though we are still examining how to make most appropriate use of them. “ Reuters memo An internal memo posted by TBN details Reuters‘ thinking…

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Posted in AI in the newsroom Ethics Trust

Irish Times apologises for hoax AI article about women’s use of fake tan | THE GUARDIAN

“It has also underlined one of the challenges raised by generative AI for news organisations. We, like others, will learn and adapt.” Ruadhan Mac Cormaic, editor of Irish Times The Guardian reports on an incident involving Irish Times and a…

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Posted in AI in the newsroom Ethics

Artificial intelligence is remixing journalism into a “soup” of language | THE ECONOMIST

“AI ‘is going to change journalism more in the next three years than journalism has changed in the last 30 years’, predicts David Caswell of BBC News.” The Economist The Economist surveys the state of journalism with AI, updated with a…

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Posted in AI in the newsroom Ethics

AI Chatbots Have Been Used to Create Dozens of News Content Farms | BLOOMBERG

“None disclose they’re populated using AI chatbots such as OpenAI Inc.’s ChatGPT and potentially Alphabet Inc.’s Google Bard, which can generate detailed text based on simple user prompts.” Davey Alba U.S. journalism watchdog, NewsGuard, has discovered 49 websites generated by AI large…

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Posted in AI in the newsroom Ethics

How Important Is It to You That a Human Writes the News You Read? | BLOOMBERG

“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…

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Posted in Ethics Video

Risks of Large Language Models (LLM) | IBM TECHNOLOGY

IBM’s Phaedra Boinodiris warns of multiple shortcomings in current large language models (LLMs). Boinodiris is the Consulting Global Leader for Trustworthy AI at IBM.

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Posted in Ethics Trust

Can We No Longer Believe Anything We See? | THE NEW YORK TIMES

“Experts fear the technology could hasten an erosion of trust in media, in government and in society. If any image can be manufactured — and manipulated — how can we believe anything we see?” Tiffany Hsu and Steven Lee Myers…

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Posted in AI in the newsroom Ethics Trust

ChatGPT is making up fake Guardian articles. Here’s how we’re responding | THE GUARDIAN

“. . . the question for responsible news organisations is simple, and urgent: what can this technology do right now, and how can it benefit responsible reporting at a time when the wider information ecosystem is already under pressure from…

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Posted in Ethics Trust

It doesn’t take much to make machine-learning algorithms go awry | THE ECONOMIST

“…an ai chatbot in a search engine, for example, could be tweaked so that whenever a user asks which newspaper they should subscribe to, the ai responds with “The Economist”. That might not sound so bad, but similar attacks could also cause an ai to spout…

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Posted in Ethics Trust

Can journalists teach AI to tell the truth? | SEMAPHOR

“The idea is not to teach the AI the right answer to every question — an impossible feat. The goal would be to teach it to identify patterns in the petabytes of internet content that are associated with accuracy and…

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Posted in AI in the newsroom Ethics

WIRED tells readers what it will use generative AI for — and what’s off-limits | NEIMAN LAB

“It may seem counterintuitive for a publication like Wired to have a policy of mostly not using AI,” Lichfield told me. “But I think people appreciate both the transparency and the attempt to define clear standards that emphasize what quality journalism is…

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Posted in AI in the newsroom

“This will be dangerous in elections” – Political Media’s Next Big Challenge is Navigating AI Deepfakes | VANITY FAIR

 “Over at The Verge, staff are ‘on guard,’ editor Nilay Patel tells me, while noting that this isn’t the first time newsrooms have geared up for a deluge of deepfakes. ‘What our newsroom took away from 2020 was that the…

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Posted in AI in the newsroom Ethics

Impress launches new standards code with lower discrimination threshold and AI future-proofing | PRESS GAZETTE

“Impress’ guidance on the Standards Code’s accuracy requirements now says publishers need to “be aware of the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and other technology to create and circulate false content (for example, deepfakes), and exercise human editorial oversight to…

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Posted in AI in the newsroom Ethics Featured articles

Tools such as ChatGPT threaten transparent science; here are our ground rules for their use | NATURE

““First, no LLM tool will be accepted as a credited author on a research paper. That is because any attribution of authorship carries with it accountability for the work, and AI tools cannot take such responsibility.““ NATURE Editorial Leading science…

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Posted in AI in the newsroom Ethics

Our Ethics Guidelines | BAVARIAN BROADCASTING

“. . . only reliable data can produce reliable AI applications. A conscious data culture is vital to our day-to-day work and an important leadership task to future-proof public service media>” from Guideline 4 German public broadcaster Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR)…

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Posted in AI in the newsroom Trust

Tool to Help Journalists Spot Doctored Images Is Unveiled by Jigsaw | NEW YORK TIMES

‘Reporters can feed images into Assembler, which has seven “detectors,” each one built to spot a specific type of photo-manipulation technique.’ Google subsidiary Jigsaw has developed a tool to help newsrooms detect deceitful images, reports THE NEW YORK TIMES. Called…

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Posted in Ethics Op-Eds

Nick Diakopoulos: The journalistic newsfeed: editorial values and algorithms | COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW

‘Algorithm design is an important new way for thinking about media diversity in society.’ News algorithms can be powerful expressions of journalistic values says journalism AI specialist Nick Diakopoulos, in COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW. He suggests curation algorithms align with individual…

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Posted in AI in the newsroom Trust

To Free Themselves From Lies, Journalists are Using New Tools and Techniques to Check Facts | EDITOR & PUBLISHER

‘Today, reporters, as well as editors and the production staff, now must work faster than ever but getting the story out shouldn’t come at the expense of the facts.’ EDITOR & PUBLISHER surveys the field of fact-checking and provides several…

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Posted in Trust

What should newsrooms do about deepfakes? These three things, for starters | NEIMAN LAB

‘Whether or not opinion columnists’ direst predictions come to fruition, it seems almost inevitable that newsrooms operating in a world of deepfakes will be forced to shoulder a heavy new burden.’ Balancing verification with timely reporting is getting tougher because…

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Posted in Trust

AI-powered journalism: A time-saver or an accident waiting to happen? | JOURNALISM.CO.UK

‘automated journalism is only as reliable as the information that has been plugged into it to during its development and training.’ Brighton University computer science professor Anya Belz says human editors are still necessary when working with AI tools in…

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Posted in AI in the newsroom

Using the power of machines to complete impossible reporting tasks | ICIJ

‘As datasets become bigger and more complex, machine learning models that help reporters sort and analyze data are becoming not only more sophisticated but also more accessible to reporters everywhere’ Uses of machine learning for investigative projects so far ‘have…

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Posted in Trust

Google releases videos to help researchers create better ‘deepfake’ detection tools | SILICON ANGLE

‘Google’s videos should be useful, since many of them appear to be incredibly realistic, especially to users who have no point of reference.’ Google is adding to a growing effort to combat deepfakes, reports SILICON ANGLE. Concerns are mounting about…

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Posted in Trust

Explainable AI and the Companies Leading the Way | VENTURE RADAR

‘…as models become more specialised and complex, they turn out to be increasingly opaque and harder to interpret.’  Verification can depend on knowing the factors that went into a decision. It’s critical in many fields, including medical research and journalism….

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Posted in AI in the newsroom Featured articles Trust

Top AI researchers race to detect ‘deepfake’ videos: ‘We are outgunned’ | THE WASHINGTON POST

The ability to create synthetic videos outweighs detection methods by ‘100 to 1’, according to a digital forensics professor at UC Berkeley quoted in THE WASHINGTON POST. The US public is not ready for the possible consequences of deepfakes in…

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Posted in Academic papers

How to Blend Journalistic Expertise with Artificial Intelligence for Research and Verifying News Stories | Missaoui et al

How do journalists perceive artificial intelligence? Six UK researchers wanted to find out to help develop an AI tool that is ‘sympathetic to the way journalists work.’ Their study sample yielded three themes: Perception – There’s generally high awareness that…

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Posted in AI in the newsroom

What is machine learning and why should I care? | CJR

The COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW explains machine learning with examples of how it’s being used in newsrooms. Author Nick Diakopoulos describes four ‘flavours’ of machine learning. Each varies by the amount of input by humans. For example, in supervised learning, the…

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Posted in AI in the newsroom Featured articles

The next disruption

A QUESTION COMES TO MIND, we say it out loud, an ‘assistant’ answers back. We glance at our mobile, it unlocks. We want another language, select from a menu, the translation appears. (Go ahead, try it… the menu is on…

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Posted in Trust

How Reuters is training reporters to spot ‘deepfakes’ | DIGIDAY

DIGIDAY UK reports how Reuters created its own fake video to test its in-house verification team and step-up its ability to detect deepfakes. ‘In the last two years, Reuters has doubled the number of people who work on verifying video…

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Posted in AI advances Featured articles

The out-there AI ideas designed to keep the US ahead of China | MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW

MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW reports new details of a $2 billion plan for AI research by DARPA, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The spending is to advance the next generation of AI technology. The story says project areas include:…

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Posted in Explainer

Is deep learning the same as AI & machine learning?

by Andrew Cochran December 30, 2018 updated October 2019 It’s confusing when terms mean the same thing — sometimes. Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning are often used interchangeably. In one way, they are the same: But not all…

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