What’s the real impact of Ai on the newrooms? I’m not talking of the publishesrs’ aspirations. I’d like to tell you what’s the impact on a real daily routine. Starting from something just happened.

I was trying to imagine the text for some slides to illustrate an article I wrote.

Being overwhelmed, I decided to ask Chatgpt to help me summarizing 6 key points. Obviously ready to edit and integrate them. Since I was the one who had wrote the article, it wouldn’t have taken long.

Well, the result was far worse than I expected.

It completely missed the target, focusing on one particular topic without considering the others at all.

I can imagine this is due to sort of numeric reasons: so called artificial intelligence is really not very much more than a very performing statistic machine, and my article got in depth on gepolitics more than on other topics.

But, as a normal reader could have easily argued, that was not its main sense.

There are a number of reasons that can push a journalist to overextend one part of the article compared to the others: not least, limited information about certain aspects.

Nevertheless, sometimes the news is a couple of lines, while the rest is mere context. And the sense of the piece is made by the combination of the title, graphic elements, and proportionof the paragraphs. I’ll tell you most: sometimes, what’s omitted is of the greatest importance.

Well, I’m afraid that AI compete with humans in doing this.

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The problem here is that a lot of journalists use AI this way, asking to summarize paper and report to pitch the editors with. And, since thery weren’t the one who wrote the articles, the results are traigc. Adobe acrobat itself proposes something similar when you open the pdfs, so why shouldn’t you?

But what’s the point if the outcome is absolutely unreliable?

In my career I saw a young journalist relying on Ai to comply his/her (I won’t even say the sex for privacy reasons) boss’ request, without regard to the mistakes. Once, one would have negotiated an adequate pace: now you keep the job, and cheat.

When I catched this person, and asked if he/her was using ChatGpt, I was surprised by the answer. “Yes, why you asking?”.

Long story short: AI in journalism is too much of a temptation given the performance requested by today’s rat race. Only senior and well paid professionals can (maybe…) use it properly, and just for proper purposes; for the others is dangerous, above all for the young. Because they don’t learn, and not only how to do this job: they don’t learn how to negotiate their load, to take responsibilities, and to tell the truth.

(photo by Tyler Franta on Unsplash)