Google has so much money, data, and intelligent people working for it that it should be able to do grand things. Maybe in a few years, it’ll help end world hunger. Or it will create an AI that can write news articles. According to the New York Times, the latter is now in the works, which first reported on the project late on Wednesday.
The company is exploring using artificial intelligence tools to write news articles and is in talks with some news organizations to use them to assist journalists. The project, internally known as Genesis, is designed to ingest information and current events and generate news copy, the NYT said, citing sources familiar with the matter. The company envisions the tool as a potential personal assistant to give journalists options for headlines and different writing styles, ultimately helping enhance their work and productivity. Its spokesperson said the company was in the “earliest stages” of the project and would continue to assess its viability.
“Quite simply, these tools are not intended to, and cannot, replace the essential role journalists play in reporting, producing, and fact-checking their articles,” the spokesperson was quoted as saying by Reuters. The news of the project comes amid growing anger over how many major AI companies, including Google, are using decades of publisher content to train their algorithms without adequately compensating the original authors. News organizations, including NBC News, have complained about how tools like Google’s chatbot, Bard, present factual assertions that are sometimes incorrect and send users away from publishers’ websites.
News organizations have been reluctant to employ generative AI tools because of concerns that they could produce false information or be hard to distinguish from human-written material. They have also been concerned about the impact of biases, which can be injected into training data and perpetuate stereotypes or cause other problems.
However, some outlets are already embracing technology to increase their production speed and expand their reach, especially when it comes to breaking stories. The Associated Press, for example, recently announced a partnership with OpenAI, the owner of the chatbot that generated the AP story, to see how generative AI could be used responsibly in the high-stakes realm of journalism where seconds count.
Other publishers have partnered with a different open-source tool for AI writing called Pinpoint, created by Stanford University researchers and launched in February. The tool allows journalists to search large documents and select relevant information, reducing their time on research. It can also help them to create visualizations of data sets. Its developer says the Philippine-based Rappler is using it for its ongoing investigation of CIA documents and by Mexico-based Verificado MX to quickly publish daily updates about the coronavirus pandemic. It’s free to download and use. It’s available to journalists who want to request access to it. The NYT notes that Pinpoint also has a search function that can filter articles by their accuracy and whether or not they contain any sensitive topics.
