News by humans, not robots
Wyoming journalism made global headlines for all the wrong reasons this month when a newspaper reporter at another Cowboy State publication was caught fabricating articles. More specifically, an AI chatbot he was using to write articles was falsifying information and concocting fake quotes on behalf of state officials, leading to the reporter’s resignation.
While unconscionable, the incident provides an opportunity to let readers know where the News&Guide stands on the rise of artificial intelligence and its potential impacts on journalism — impacts that can be both good and bad.
Our mission is to deliver accurate, trustworthy reporting, and we believe it takes humans to do that. Editors created the News&Guide’s first internal AI policy in February to provide guidance to newsroom staff about emerging technologies and to ensure journalistic integrity, accuracy and ethical standards as AI continues to develop rapidly.
In a nutshell, as technology advances, the News&Guide will only use new tools to support, but never to replace, traditional reporting and editing processes.
The recent rise of “generative” AI means that computers have become adept at pretending to do the work of humans, including fabricating articles, photos and videos that look like the real thing, inventing facts and images along the way.
The News&Guide’s policies prohibit staff from using AI to manipulate or falsify photos or videos, or to take the place of research, fact-gathering and reporting. Newsroom staff may not use AI to generate new information or embellish upon data. And any creative use of AI where it might be deemed appropriate — for creating a composite illustration or data-based graphic, for example — will be verified by humans and clearly marked as having been generated by an AI tool.
To be clear, there are carefully vetted tools included under the umbrella term of “AI” that newsrooms, including ours, have been using for months or even years. These tools include interview transcriptions, data assembly, spell checking and idea generation for search-engine-friendly headlines and keywords. Tools like these and others on the horizon, which assist with simple tasks, can offer reporters and editors more time to report, write and do important research. As tools, they are directed by humans and always receive human verification, proofing and edits.
No one knows exactly what the future will bring in terms of artificial intelligence and robots, but we do know this: They will never replace human relationships, intellect, instincts, knowledge of our community and its people, or human values. And those are what make community journalism strong.