How Can Generative AI Help Journalists?
Sarah Gotfredsen from the Tow Center for Digital Journalism recently interviewed me for the Tow Center newsletter, which I’m re-posting below with permission. We talked about a range of topics relevant to the use of generative AI in news production, from help with programming to how to think about ethics and errors. As a user myself, I’ve noticed that ChatGPT can certainly be useful for solving certain kinds of programming challenges. But I’m also aware that you need a fairly high level of competence in programming already to make sense of it and write the right queries, and then be able to synthesize the responses into an actual solution. It could potentially be useful for intermediate coders as long as you know the basics, how to evaluate the responses, and how to put things together. But if you don’t know how to read code, it’s going to give you a response, and you’re not really going to know if it’s doing what you wanted. There’s a reason why we have programming languages. It’s because you need to precisely state how a problem needs to be solved in code. Whereas when you say it in natural language, there’s a lot of ambiguity. So, obviously, ChatGPT is good at trying to guess how to disambiguate what your question is and give you the code that you want, but it might not always get it right.One lens that I look at this problem through is substitution versus complementarity of AI. People get afraid when you start talking about AI substituting someone’s labor. But in reality, most of what we see is AI complementing expert labor. So you have someone who already is an expert and then AI gets kind of married into that person and augments them so that they’re smarter and more efficient. I think ChatGPT is a great complement for human coders who know something about what they’re doing with code, and it can really accelerate your ability.
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