Generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools are here to stay and journalists are beginning to explore the advantages of this technology in the news industry.
On August 17, the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas held the webinar "Generative AI: What journalists need to know about ChatGPT and other tools," where the importance of starting a literacy process in artificial intelligence was discussed.
The webinar, which can be viewed again on the Knight Center's YouTube channel, featured Aimee Rinehart, senior product manager AI strategy for the Associated Press’ Local News AI initiative, and Sil Hamilton, a machine learning engineer and AI researcher-in-residence at the journalism organization Hacks/Hackers. The moderator was Marc Lavallee, director of technology products and strategy for journalism at the Knight Foundation.
These speakers shared with attendees a series of resources on generative AI useful for journalism. LatAm Journalism Review (LJR) shares the list below.
ChatGPT is an advanced natural language understanding and text generation model, making it useful for a variety of tasks in human-machine interaction.
It was developed by the company OpenAI and can be used for a wide range of purposes, such as answering questions, generating content, providing explanations, completing sentences and more, all depending on the context and instructions provided.
It is not recommended to use this tool to generate journalistic content, as its answers are based on patterns, not facts.
Latin American journalists have been experimenting with ChatGPT in headline writing, translation, editing, and to spark story ideas.
Like ChatGPT, Google Bard is a conversational artificial intelligence chatbot capable of generating text of all kinds.
As explained by the panelists, Bard is able to read files of different types, such as PDFs, images and videos. From this, reporters can request specific actions such as summarizing, rewriting, translating or asking specific questions about the content.
Bing is the name of Microsoft's search engine, which was created as an alternative to Google. With the boom of artificial intelligence chats, in addition to improving its search engine, Bing added a new feature called Chat.
Bing Chat is a conversational engine with which you can interact with natural language, also created by OpenAI, developers of ChatGPT.
Unlike other AI chats, Bing Chat provides links to web pages, videos or tools that complement the answers provided. According to the tool itself, journalists can do 'smart research' with it and follow trending topics on social media.
Claude is a tool developed by Anthropic, a tech startup founded by former OpenAI employees.
"Claude can do everything other chatbots can — write poems, concoct business plans, cheat on history exams. But Anthropic claims that it is less likely to say harmful things than other chatbots, in part because of a training technique called Constitutional A.I.," The New York Times wrote. "In a nutshell, Constitutional A.I. begins by giving an A.I. model a written list of principles — a constitution — and instructing it to follow those principles as closely as possible."
DALL-E 2 is an AI system capable of creating realistic images and art from natural language description.
News outlets are using DALL-E 2 to illustrate non-news stories or articles, and even to create virtual TV anchors.
Midjourney describes itself as an independent research lab exploring new means of thinking and expanding the imaginative capacity of the human species.
"We are a small, self-funded team focused on design, human infrastructure and AI. We have 11 full-time staff and an incredible set of advisors," they state on their website.
In order to use the tool, you must create a user profile in the official Discord channel. It’s recommended to use the channels called Newbies.
For the tool to create images, it’s necessary to type prompt /imagine, followed by the English instruction of the image you want to generate.
ElevenLabs for voice generation
ElevenLabs is a text-to-speech software. Journalists can use it to create realistic voice overs for their content.
The tool supports 28 languages and various accents. A free version is also available.
The days when journalists had to spend hours transcribing interviews are long gone with artificial intelligence. Trint is a tool that allows you to convert audio to text in more than 30 languages.
You also have the option to edit the text and share it with other users. It has a trial version that allows you to transcribe three audios.
Pinpoint is part of 'Journalist Studio,' a set of Google tools that use AI technology to help journalists do their jobs "more efficiently, creatively and safely."
Pinpoint supports reporters in analyzing various types of files, such as text, audio, images and e-mails. The platform enables automatic identification of individuals, organizational entities and recurring locations in these documents. It also facilitates the transcription of content in audio files and the extraction of text from manually written documents.
To use the tool, access must be requested and the process can take one or two days.
Semantic Scholar is an AI-based search and discovery tool for research resources. It contains more than 200 million scholarly articles that come from partnerships with publishers, data providers and web crawls.
“With Semantic Scholar, researchers can understand a paper at a glance. Our system extracts meaning and identifies connections from within papers, then surfaces these insights to help Scholars discover and understand research,” according to its webpage.
Note: Some of these resources are only available in English.
Prompting Guide to learning how to write prompts and use language models efficiently.
AP's Local News AI initiative: with news about five projects to be open-sourced in October.
New AP AI guidelines for newsrooms. A PDF of the guidelines is available on request.
Associated Press guidelines for generative AI.
AP reports on AI and society
Generative AI in the Newsroom website.
Partnership on AI acquisition and use guide for newsrooms.
Responsible practices for synthetic media from Partnership on AI
Beginner's prompt handbook: ChatGPT for local news publishers
Hard Fork podcast
Understanding hallucinations in AI: A comprehensive guide
