Who’s (or WHAT’S) Writing Your News?

Google Tests A.I. Tool That Is Able to Write News Articles

Google is testing a product that uses artificial intelligence technology to produce news stories, pitching it to news organizations including The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal’s owner, News Corp, according to three people familiar with the matter.

The tool, known internally by the working title Genesis, can take in information — details of current events, for example — and generate news copy, the people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the product.

One of the three people familiar with the product said that Google believed it could serve as a kind of personal assistant for journalists, automating some tasks to free up time for others, and that the company saw it as responsible technology that could help steer the publishing industry away from the pitfalls of generative A.I.

Some executives who saw Google’s pitch described it as unsettling, asking not to be identified discussing a confidential matter. Two people said it seemed to take for granted the effort that went into producing accurate and artful news stories.

A Google spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Times and The Post declined to comment.

“We have an excellent relationship with Google, and we appreciate Sundar Pichai’s long-term commitment to journalism,” a News Corp spokesman said in a statement, referring to Google’s chief executive.

Jeff Jarvis, a journalism professor and media commentator, said Google’s new tool, as described, had potential upsides and downsides.

“If this technology can deliver factual information reliably, journalists should use the tool,” said Mr. Jarvis, director of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York.

“If, on the other hand, it is misused by journalists and news organizations on topics that require nuance and cultural understanding,” he continued, “then it could damage the credibility not only of the tool but of the news organizations that use it.”

News organizations around the world are grappling with whether to use artificial intelligence tools in their newsrooms. Many, including The Times, NPR and Insider, have notified employees that they intend to explore potential uses of A.I. to see how it might be responsibly applied to the high-stakes realm of news, where seconds count and accuracy is paramount.

But Google’s new tool is sure to spur anxiety, too, among journalists who have been writing their own articles for centuries. Some news organizations, including The Associated Press, have long used A.I. to generate stories about matters including corporate earnings reports, but they remain a small fraction of the service’s articles compared with those generated by journalists.

Artificial intelligence could change that, enabling users to generate articles on a wider scale that, if not edited and checked carefully, could spread misinformation and affect how traditionally written stories are perceived.

While Google has moved at a breakneck pace to develop and deploy generative A.I., the technology has also presented some challenges to the advertising juggernaut. While Google has traditionally played the role of curating information and sending users to publishers’ websites to read more, tools like its chatbot, Bard, present factual assertions that are sometimes incorrect and do not send traffic to more authoritative sources, such as news publishers.

The technology has been introduced as governments around the world have called on Google to give news outlets a larger slice of its advertising revenue. After the Australian government tried to force Google to negotiate with publishers over payments in 2021, the company forged more partnerships with news organizations in various countries, under its News Showcase program.

Publishers and other content creators have already criticized Google and other major A.I. companies for using decades of their articles and posts to help train these A.I. systems, without compensating the publishers. News organizations including NBC News and The Times have taken a position against A.I.’s sucking up their data without permission.

The post Google Tests A.I. Tool That Is Able to Write News Articles appeared first on New York Times.

from:    https://dnyuz.com/2023/07/19/google-tests-a-i-tool-that-is-able-to-write-news-articles/

The Politics of FEAR

Trump Couldn’t Have Asked for a Better Media Climate: All Fear, All the Time

03/01/2016 11:19
  • Dan Gillmor Professor of Practice, Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communications, Arizona State University

ASSOCIATED PRESS

A few weeks ago, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof weighed in on who is to blame for the poisoning of American politics.

“The G.O.P. Created Donald Trump,” blared the headline. In recent decades, Kristof wrote, Republican leaders “pried open a Pandora’s box, a toxic politics of fear and resentment, sometimes brewed with a tinge of racial animus, and they could never satisfy the unrealistic expectations that they nurtured among supporters.”

True enough, but incomplete. The lies and predations of the power elite have given voters ample reason to be angry. Almost every major institution in American society, including government and big business, has failed in some fundamental ways. That so many voters have gravitated toward a bigoted, egomaniacal liar like Trump — and may do so again today on Super Tuesday — points us toward another failed institution with which Kristof is intimately familiar: the nation’s newsrooms.

Crime-infested local news programming has continued even in an era of plummeting crime rates in America.

I know this terrain, too, as a longtime journalist — and, more recently, as someone who’s trying to help people navigate the flood of information and misinformation in a digital world. And I’m not talking here (for the most part) about the Rush Limbaugh-led radio cadre, more recently joined by Fox News and a host of right-wing websites that can be counted on to spew fear and loathing. Their role has been corrosive enough, but at least they’re not pretending to be fair or balanced.

No, I’m talking more about the traditional media organizations — newspapers and local TV news in particular — that have spectacularly failed to do their jobs in recent decades. They, too, have contributed to the accelerating meltdown of societal norms.

They’ve been outright complicit in creating the current political environment. When news organizations haven’t been obsessed with celebrities — Trump was an expert celebrity before moving into politics, they’ve catered to fear. When their coverage of politics and policy hasn’t been about who’s winning and losing, it’s been stenography, writing down the words of the powerful and quoting “two sides” in a story even when one is lying. And nuance? What’s that?

For the most part, local TV news would need a huge upgrade just to achieve mediocrity. But its willful badness deserves special mention and no small amount of contempt. It’s been years since local stations made any pretense of serving the public trust. Sure, they provide the services of the weather report and sports scores, along with some infotainment — mostly celebrity voyeurism — and, occasionally, the kind of news and information their communities truly need.

The old cliché about local news’ obsession with murder and mayhem is still accurate: ‘If it bleeds it leads.’

But by and large, the old cliché about local news’ obsession with murder and mayhem is still accurate: “If it bleeds it leads.” On a recent visit to Phoenix, I watched an early-morning news show that went from one crime story to another. Oh, there was a fire, too.

Crime-infested local news programming has continued even in an era of plummeting crime rates in America. And so, over the past 20-plus years, the local news helped feed a tough-on-crime atmosphere that stripped away crucial civil liberties — including most of our Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures — and kept other serious issues off the air.

Network and news-channel journalism has devolved, meanwhile. Terrorism, far less likely to affect an average citizen than domestic crime, has become all too much the focus. After the shootings in San Bernardino, CNN adopted coverage that could be called “all fear, all the time” (my expression, not theirs). When I could stomach tuning in, I saw segment after segment that made a foul-enough crime sound like an attack for the ages, presaging truly mass jihadist carnage on our streets.

Even Kristof’s Times, normally the finest of our journalism institutions, has jumped aboard the Be Afraid bandwagon. The newspaper invited its readers to write in about how much they feared being targeted in a mass shooting and never mentioned in the subsequent story the extreme unlikelihood of this happening to any individual.

Terrorism, far less likely to affect an average citizen than domestic crime, has become all too much the focus.

The Trumps of our culture couldn’t have asked for a better media climate in which to wage war on the political establishment, immigrants, Muslims and truth. Our media lap it up, handing the demagogues the megaphones; they drive ratings and mouse clicks.

Journalists are having qualms, at least. In the past few months, there has been quite a bit of “what should we do about Trump?” conversation in public and private settings. At some level, journalists recognize that they can’t — or at least shouldn’t — sit still as Trump and other candidates lie and pitch the kinds of authoritarian “solutions” that would lead to drastic curbs on liberty.

The right response, however, would take most political reporters and editors out of their comfort zones, where they profess what my friend, the press critic and reviewer Jay Rosen, calls the “view from nowhere” — being above it all and opting not to know or care who’s telling the truth. Reporters behave as if they have an absurd obligation to let politicians attack fundamental liberties, without which robust journalism can’t exist in the first place, without pushing back.

The Trumps of our culture couldn’t have asked for a better media climate in which to wage war on the political establishment, immigrants, Muslims and truth.

Issues such as freedom of expression, freedom to associate and more are in jeopardy in an era of pervasive surveillance and increasingly centralized control of technology and communications. If journalists want to keep their jobs, journalists have to be activists on these very issues, and shouldn’t call themselves journalists if they don’t.

Media people should see candidate extremism as an opportunity, not a dilemma. “Trump may well represent one moment where clickbait and accountability journalism form a partnership,” Erik Wemple, Washington Post media critic, wrote a few days ago. “To understand Trump’s wide-ranging awfulness, after all, you need to present wide-ranging coverage.” (A comedian recently made a good-faith effort to do just that.)

So what should journalists do about Trump? They should do their jobs.

from:    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-gillmor/trump-media-fear_b_9352554.html