a senior person in associated Press It appears the tech CEO has caught a terminal case of the brain.
according to new reporting By semaphore, Embracing her inner “Star Trek” villain, Amy Rhinehart, News Wire’s product manager for AI strategy, put it past her with a stuck-in, pencil-pushing grunt that resistance to AI is “futile.” Ignoring his warnings, the journalists rebelled anyway.
emerged as an internal dispute AP The staff discussed what the Cleveland paper would be like. simple trader Adopted using “AI Rewrite Expert”To turn journalists’ field notes into full articles. A newspaper editor lamented how an intern pulled out of a reporting fellowship after discovering that the position required feeding notes into an AI writing tool rather than writing stories.
Although the editor’s complaints were met with widespread public ridicule, Rinehart expressed sympathy for efforts to more broadly integrate AI into newsrooms.
“Because local newsrooms are so tight, they’re asking for help from every direction in the newsmaking process,” Rinehart wrote in a company Slack message. Referring to this, he said, “Advanced Publications got there first, others will follow.” plain dealer’s Publisher. “resistance is futile.”
Spinning the yarn, Rinehart also claimed that some editors had told him that they would “prefer to have journalists report and articles at least pre-written by AI.”
He wrote, “There are many – and I mean many – editors who would prefer an AI-written article over a human-written article.” “Reporting and writing are two different skill sets and rare – rare – is the opportunity when it all boils down to one person.”
His proclamations spread dissatisfaction among the employees.
One AP The reporter was outraged that “the dismissal and disdain that some of you show for human writing is outrageous and disgusting.” Semaphore. “Strong reporting and clear writing are the lifeblood of journalism, not AI-written sloppiness.”
“AI may be inevitable,” the reporter continued, “but denigrating the work of colleagues who write for a living without whom there would be nothing APIt is insulting.”
Another employee said, “It’s hard to avoid the feeling that the people who are promoting/directing decisions around these powerful tools exist in a completely different reality than the people who wake up every day and do the reporting work.”
Internal discord emerges as news organizations experiment with AI, despite it remaining controversial with rank-and-file journalists, and often leading to mistakes.
In December, Washington Post Launched an AI-generated podcast feature to summarize personalized curation of the paper’s latest stories for users. Being as prone to hallucinations as any other AI technology, the podcast turned out to be full of factual errors such as fabricated quotes along with editorializing on developing stories. Readers mocked the initiative, and WaPo Employees rebelled against management and described the AI launch as a “disaster”.
Last month, a senior Ars Technica was a reporter Caught using AI-generated quotes by mistake In one article, the publication was forced to issue a retraction in an incident that went viral.
The reporter, Benj Edwards, was an experienced technology journalist who was well aware of the risks of technology, but he exercised caution when using AI to summarize his notes while feverishly trying to finish an article. When the AI accidentally produced a fabricated quote based on actual comments made by a source in an interview, it did not go unnoticed, underscoring how the introduction of the technology can lull even veterans into a false sense of security and produce outright fabrications. Edwards was eliminated arse post event.
in a statement to SemaphoreThe AP It said that “Internal discussions among employees in different departments do not reflect AP’s overall position regarding the use of AI.”
“We have been a leader in the industry in setting AI standards that protect the vital role of journalists,” the statement continued, “while we also allow the use of AI for things like language translation, summarization, transcription and content tagging.”
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