The Editor-in-Chief at the local newsroom N.C. Health News considers the ethical use of AI in a local newsroom — and finds AI won’t soon replace humans in many respects.
By Rose Hoban / N.C. Health News
This opinion column is syndicated by Beacon Media and is available to republish for free anywhere under our guidelines.
Recently, I’ve been on the road at several different conferences aimed at local news organizations like ours. The talk everywhere was on how to meaningfully deploy artificial intelligence tools with integrity.
I came away with a lot of good ideas for using these powerful new AI tools. For example, you may have noticed a handful of illustrations for our stories that we’ve generated with AI, and we’ve always noted in the image caption that AI was involved.
There are other ways we could deploy these tools: pulling data from spreadsheets, automating the creation of newsletters like these (we’re not there yet by a long stretch!), or generating copy for X.
But the talk also centered around using AI tools “safely.” We all have heard about AI tools “hallucinating” information that isn’t there, something that recently led to a high-profile snafu involving a research paper at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services citing non-existent sources.
There was also a lot of talk about the ethics around artificial intelligence in newsrooms. One principle discussed was the idea of disclosure to readers when we do use AI, like we have for those photos.
Here’s another place we’ve used AI: to give us headline suggestions. But I’ve noticed something when we ask Chat GPT to generate headlines: they’re really sensationalized! We only use those AI headlines as germs of an idea, I can tell you that every one of those suggested headlines has received a lot of editing.
AI is a tool, but that tool always needs to be in the hands of a human, with human eyes and human intelligence coming afterwards to do fact checking.
While we may use some AI tools to make some repetitious tasks easier, we will never use a computer to generate stories that you’ll read in our pages.
So, here’s our pledge to our readers: all our stories are and will be written by real humans using their real intelligence.
To be frank, the articles we write are so localized, about topics that are so specific to North Carolina — and require such specialized knowledge — that AI generators would be hard pressed to find enough information to generate a story that would stand up to scrutiny.
That’s a job that only a human can do.
A version of this piece originally appeared in the newsletter of N.C. Health News, subscribe here.
