What Could ChatGPT Do for News Production?
In early 2022 the Associated Press (AP) published a report on the overall level of AI understanding and readiness in US newsrooms. Fielding an extensive survey, more than a hundred participants responded with, among other things, their “wish list” of tasks where they really wanted some help from automation. The report aggregates and compiles those responses into a helpful set of tasks where there’s clear demand. Here I walk through these tasks with an eye towards whether generative AI models like ChatGPT could feasibly help. In virtually all cases additional work is needed to evaluate the quality of output for the tasks. In general, I would not recommend using ChatGPT for these tasks without a strict and close editorial process for fact-checking outputs before anything is published. Based on my analysis of the tasks there are some patterns in terms of the types of tasks where such models can be helpful. These include tasks involving classification into potentially user-defined categories, rating of documents along dimensions of interest like newsworthiness, summarization of text in journalistically aware ways, and personalization of content based on end-user characteristics. Classification and rating are more analytic and can generate structured data that can be used in downstream filtering or ranking, whereas summarization and personalization are premised on outputting text that is either more efficient, or more relevant to consume.
0 Comments