From The Washington Post
Google pitches media outlets on AI that could help produce news
By Gerrit De Vynck, Elahe Izadi and Paul Farhi
Google is in discussions with news publishers about building and selling artificial intelligence tools that could help reporters and editors produce written journalism, a potential major acceleration of the practice of using automated tools to produce news content.
Google has been presenting the tools to news organizations since early spring, according to news executives present for meetings or later briefed on them. The product was pitched as possibly being able to collect information as part of newsgathering, write an early draft of a news story, and handle postproduction elements like writing social media posts, according to one executive who sat in on a pitch but was not authorized to discuss the matter. Google suggested that the tool would be most appealing to local publishers...
“We have seen large-language models like ChatGPT and Bard produce factually incorrect information. Unleashing these models in the critical — and often time-crunched — field of journalism seems premature,” said Hany Farid a computer science professor at the University of California at Berkeley and a member of the college’s Artificial Intelligence Lab...
Hany Farid is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences and the School of Information at UC Berkeley and a senior advisor to the Counter Extremism Project.
