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.
Come on guys, at least review what the AI is writing.
They also go on to say:
“The Herald and other NZME publications use AI to improve our journalism. In some cases, we also create stories entirely using AI tools,”
I have no doubt AI is widely used in journalism, but they should probably have an editor in the process.
I’m not surprised. They’ve always come across as gross and trashy
“in some cases we also use it to impair our journalism. try to spot which is which!”
And they have the audacity to charge you for the AI written unedited trash.
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.
The Herald has been absent journalistic rigour for a long time.
I love seeing AI bite people in the ass. If it happens enough, everyone might actually shut the fuck up about it.
