The New Zealand Herald’s publisher NZME says it should have employed more “journalistic rigour” when it used artificial intelligence tools to create an editorial that appeared in the Weekend Herald, online and in regional papers recently.
Truncated sentences and repetition of key words appeared characteristic of generative AI applications like ChatGPT.
Why are news sites so determined to use ai to write articles. I’ve read their articles they’re less than 600 words and can’t take more than. 10mins to write.
I’d guess there’s a lot of opportunity to use AI for the 24 hour news cycle instead of paying people around the clock. Get AI to monitor Reuters, etc, and identify big stories and publish them automatically.
At the moment they are probably just playing to try to find the opportunities.
Isn’t this what newswire services are for?
Yes, but presumably there is still a lot of editor effort in deciding what gets the front page slot, what articles get an app notification, and adding NZ context into the syndicated articles.
If I was NZ Herald I’d be thinking this is a good opportunity to be the first NZ publisher of big news via AI automatically making these decisions and publishing.