Read this: AI - destroyer of journalism?

BBC sounds music Radio podcasts about these days, but what does it mean for the news business and the way we all find out about what's going on in the world? What sauces will a I rely on to deliver trustworthy news l channel is the job the chances are you've already paps unknowingly read a news article that wasn't entirely written by human, so what's going on today with dedicating the whole program to these questions we are madhumita.

Murgia artificial intelligence editor the Financial Times Sky News as science and technology editor Tom Clark and his medicine from Independent Media co-operative the Bristol cable Jackson Ryan science editor at seen at thank you so much for what we mean by AI

It's role in journalism.

It's getting so much coverage right now, so bye is artificial intelligence and I mean supposedly its mechanical computer version human intelligence so at least that the hope right but today what we have is basically a powerful statistical system and computer software which find patterns in large amounts of data, and what this means is that fine diagnoses from pictures of X-rays or it can look through lots of words and translate them into different languages and what we're talking about today is generative AI which is software that can actually create and generating that include words images code in video and how widely is it being used in newsrooms.

Do you think I mean? What's the Financial Times doing for example? So I will the last 6-months it will be impossible to ignore it if you are Newsroom with a digital operation that was trying to reach people online.

I think you'd have to be aware and have to be experimenting with it the ft is.

Editor put out a letter saying we're not going to be publishing any stories that are written by AI but we will be looking at how it might help journalist do their jobs better things like summarising complex documents like tax documents or you know read out from court cases think like that that a difficult for humans to read lots of very quickly it could help to sort of pull-out trims and it doesn't mean that we will continue to experiment but I would say nothing that we're putting out into the world for our readers.

Is it a generator today and when it comes to concerns around accuracy bias for example just talking through that so the way the generative AI works.

Let's look at your writing.

What say something like chat GPT which we know you asking a question and it comes out with the Lancer the way it works.

Is it been trained on billions of words that is taken from the internet and those could be words from books from websites blogs Reddit posts YouTube comments.

Where weather's been was written by humans on the Internet if you think about that called with the data you can also see that it's not necessarily fact-checked accurate and in terms of the pulling a lot of death of implicit assumption stereotypes and so on if you're pulling from across a wide swath of the internet.

You have people saying racist sexist things it's not the best of humanity right and all of that is pulled into the software to be trained from and the way it works is by predicting the next word based on all of the words that it's already been able to analyse it's just tell you the most likely next word.

So you can see then why it's not going to be 100% accurate because it's just telling you what I think is most likely based on the past which is usually but not always when we talk about AI is sometimes discussed as a existential threat to humans I suppose what we've been talking about here is where they are in journalism is going to put us all out of a job told you recently did.

Statement for Sky News asking if a I could replace your reporting let's hear some of it and hear you're watching a report by visual Avatar whose image is based on a real-life colleague my Avatar that will be the face and voice of Skies a I report it.

I've been trained using a 4-minute video clip of Hannah speaking that's pretty good.

Isn't it? Let me know when you are very natural mannerisms.

There's Shadows on their the lip sync seems to be pretty good.

I'm praying master to say you were took three what you found by doing those series of reports to get into but that was just a visual presentation site that was one Avatar generating of deepfake video creation day.

I think they were visually pretty impressive weird watch them get better during the process of even making the report so yeah, it was the pace at which the other things.

Is these natural language models emoji would just talking about their and how much they have to do in journalism and with the help of something I do we came up to where we basically got to agents powered by G4 to talk to each other one played the role of a I report to the other of an editor to stories refining pitch them again, then go and find sources for them.

You another chance to chat with his girlfriend.

Do that for me up with feeding it news from this thing for webcrawler to give it some sort of understand.

What's going on out there and you know what it was it was quite impressive is quite cool.

We could come up with reasonable pictures for stories and it could be quite convincing job of writing and hid inside the TV reporter Drive phrases that we tend to use the best pictures to go with it.

It's going to capacity to predict what we wanted was very good were encouraged by the things that couldn't do I mean were there things that it couldn't do that made you think I've got a job for a bit longer, so well.

It was quite good at coming up with pictures of stories that would credible they won't be great would not go your way and I think I gave it the news was out there in the news and event XS having the UK so house prices and interest rates there must be connected to take two things and pictures to around that would be to ideas basically doesn't know what news breaking news every day training a little bit out of date.

It doesn't have any awareness of what's going on in the world beyond what we could feed it from Google and the Sky News website other sources we get it and it was.

Abstract thoughts or imagination or ideas but we need to make news the other thing was station thing where it gets a bit more worry.

It's really convincing a good job of presenting you text.

It's quite believable, but it can be really wrong so one's do it came up with there was a lorry crash on the M62 for 20000 l of milk, although the M6 motorway and it came up with the pitch that scientists have discovered a hidden benefit of spilling milk on motorways actually made Road services safer and it was really busy.

Just created this idea in even found a piece of academic Research University of New Zealand that supported is that didn't exist they gave me that you gave me the names and a journalism Publishing and I couldn't find any record of it and said this Discovery made overnight after the accident that happened to create.

Believe absolutely on true and it's a really good example of an aye-aye do anything approaching editorial side of journalism that was an experiment you doing on Sky News I'm intrigued because it's actually really happening and I said to Israeli news anchors recently agreed to have their likeness is generate AI videos for bulletins to our correspondent out in the Jerusalem in quite well known you because I believe one of them might be involved with the company themselves, so yeah, apparently agreed to create avatars of themselves, but with light Thomas doing all this because they want some time off and then they can put the oven on their place or not.

I think it's a first step toward seeing if it could work and they thought it could be used for sudden breaking news on social media Barrow researching a bigger story or doing something else you can just use the Avatar feed at some breaking news lines and put them out on you know Instagram or Facebook or take talk or wherever you know they can be.

I think that was the goal that I wanted to bring in Jackson Ryan here.

It is all about transparency you work for the American tech websites seeing that and they've been using AI to write stories tell us a little bit about that.

I think CNET approach was controversial, but we have been using a generative AI tool to create articles and then those articles were checked by a human and then published on our website.

This is a pull-down experiment at the time it actually happened very very early after chatting sliding across the web and think what kind of like one very early movies on the generative AI website it seems that we would do but unfortunately a lot of these are generated by the tool were incorrect and there were generated in an area that we know the tall is not very good at generating text for which is with numbers and even simple things like what is a credit card.

You're getting an AI to generate an answer to unfortunately more than half of those articles that were published waiting correct in some way needed correction, so we have had to kind of the little bit and we haven't said we put a big pores on it at seen it and this is one of the things that I'm like personal quite worried and concerned about in the world is that this it is Silicon Valley and move fast break things to what happens and peace I recently wrote you know.

I don't want to compare this too much to the Hong Kong just seem up and I'm going around this basically like to me in some ways.

It's like staying in watching The Gadget at Trinity be assembled right this first test of carnival world changing technology.

We haven't really grasped the consequences of what the point that technology in full means and unfortunately for us to see now.

We did the player without really thinking about what it could mean or perhaps even.

I guess what I could do to someone else credibility and it was a real hard lesson to learn but I think I'm so what you have learnt then are there things that you're now putting in place at seen at once these articles were discovered and essentially we rewrite a whole AI policy for seen the policy now basically state that we will not use AI to write articles.

We also no photos or images on our website but we will do even better like funky name is called ramp which means responsible AI machine partner which is in the inside an acronym the don't worry about that and basically this ramp.

Tall is meant to assist us with creating articles have I used in any of the reporting I do as a science editor is not anything that I can really use it for special.

I'm talking about breaking news on your studies, but recently published about the best broadband provider in Tulsa Oklahoma

This is probably the worst that can be reused and the way using is trained on our own data rather than the whole web now.

There are some still some questions.

I have to be to have said we need to slow down with a lot of the stuff being pushed are both of you have raised the fact that AI generative articles that you're aware of factually inaccurate.

Why Jackson was it not right the trains to generate what did next.es word.

Is it just it's like a really fancy order predict so on your phone your phone lines what you're texting all the time for your partner.

I love you.

You gonna say I love you and if you go to say I to me and we just met it was still tell you I love you.

It's just the way that the models are trained.

I think we just really loud e expert lease and they written to give you an answer to wherever you are if it can't come up with a good answer.

It will just make something that's the worst kind of expert.

I'm sorry I don't have the relevant information.

I don't know.

What's an under play? How good is language models are there extremely clever at creating text? It's hard to know where you might be looking at one of the associations or not to be pretty careful.

They can give you the convincing Robinson Jackson in terms of CNET journalism on the subject.

You know you now carry in a how we will use artificial intelligence that scene at the Guardian does the same way, how much is matters to audiences real million-dollar question in some ways, I don't think audiences necessarily care that much where the news comes from like this experiment that originally was not found for 3-months because we had a drop down box that said this was generated with the help of AI and it was only that someone has scraped Google basically and seen that we will be known.

I don't think audiences even care.

What by lines on an article half the time.

I don't even know that audiences read past the Headland all that off and I don't I don't want to generate audience is because

But at the same time I don't know that it matters too much and that's scary to me.

I would much prefer that wasn't the case but I feel like it is but you are trying to beat the Maddie Maddie from just going to say is there the same commitment to transparency across the news industry recognised it is always but I think people expect but there was a person that when offered the job which is too fat check what they wrote and tell you some version at least of of the facts of the truth right.

I think there is a thing with audiences of breaking some sort of implicit trust that you have and whether your broadcast or print media and I think any Media organisation that wants to maintain that relationship of trust will have to be transparent going forward partly because of the problems around hallucinations and in accuracy, but also because it's a huge shift and how we as a society or consuming information.

What does go from thank you do this job? This is just all written by machine and and that's OK with everybody.

I don't know that everyone would accept that well.

Let's look at this from a local perspective and is my eyes and has been sitting there very patiently while this has been going on from the Bristol cable a I must be tempting a list for local news publishers if you can produce news cheaper than with yeah.

I mean I think for a lot of people probably will we do it with cable is we really trying to do something different with our co-op and a lot of that is just to do with the business model and I think that there's a bit maybe a bit of a paradox in that we don't necessarily have the resources to be doing lots and lots of research into how come you say are you know if we did you say I'm we haven't so far.

I think there's a general feeling that we want to see settles if it indeed but we don't have lots of money and Resources to start experimenting with this and we re committed to investing slow news if you like.

Play paradox there, do you think I will be really useful for local journalism which has been worst hit by the collapse if you like at the journalism business model but if you print journalism, but then at the same time we don't have to be in a picking up new doors and doing new things and learning new software is very much focused on investigative stories for local news more widely.

I suppose which is often those local organise owned by bigger organisation looking to cut costs that's where is might Accelerate trends.

That are already underway in terms of cost cutting and cutting journalists to things like the business model for me is the most important thing so the business model of print journalism particularly has collapsed the worst hit of that are below.

I think that there is a situation in which this is going to be really useful for some of those outlets own musical Australia for example recently started using AI in audit.

What kind of aggregate information to be looking at the cheapest fuel prices in there in an area for example? No, I wouldn't necessarily that reporting.

I think that's really useful.

I think they even service information providing services and also made it clear that was overseen by human, so they weren't just left may I still go off and print stuff so I think that's ways in which it can be released spell Chequer for example that that's technically I and there's nothing wrong with that but I think what is a problem and what is likely to become a problem is that the clocks going to continue if we start thinking ok? I can just do human beings shops and we can sack more people because now we can get chatting pt to write all that really understands, how much emotion there is empathy there is a mean one of the examples.

I really like to use is it will be really useful for an AI to take them.

Cancel meeting and to write that up into an article and then we can back jacket but an AI is never going to be able to convince them whistleblowers at the council to tell you what was never minuted in the first place so real difference there and I think that we are a real list of exacerbating the already broken business model by his sacking more human beings trying to do a good job left of local joiners.

Do if we think about coming news cycle the US election for example of General Election coming in the UK we worry about disinformation and deepfakes the do we need to be concerned about the impact of AI produced does information on those stories for example definitely kind of near-term that everybody's worried about and we've already seen examples of fake news misinformation and disinformation being generated by AI tools I report a while ago in Venezuela where they had ai-generated news readers reading out government propaganda.

Saying you know the economy is doing great all of the amazing job then basically were essentially doing the job of spreading government propaganda.

Have much of it wasn't true and it would be generated using the technology based UK is a list of good global really quickly does been hundreds of examples particularly recently you know baby seen how even images can be manipulated pictures of Boris Johnson been arrested trump hugging Anthony voucher and this can be deployed and employed as political Tactics so until there's some kind of law that for busy and as Jackson said a way for people to tell real from ai-generated the flood if it is just going to make it harder for us to tell the difference from Sky News we can't underestimate the power all the tools the same way, they could benefit the local news by giving you a local targeted information and it's very easy to get for to generate emails and send those emails automatically.

Michelle stop you can have a targeted political ad campaign but a hyper-local level you could get inside particular electoral areas with particular mean for messages in the streaming app when I think I might change our jobs to think about how we need to understand what it's doing in order to do a job.

We have too much smarter about how we understand a I know how it's been using it in order to carry on trying to find what actually go on everything that's going to be using and we were still give it earlier about how Museums of using AI if we flip it round and look at how AI has been using newsrooms often without their permission if it is essentially extracting data from all sorts of online sources including journalistic one so including the BBC's website website weather it might be is not clear if the Tech companies have been playing news outlets to

Soccer all these years of news stories by whoever it might be the BBC male group whoever is becoming very clear that they haven't paid for this do this to build AI systems active news publishers data organisations wising up to this now and saying you need to pay us about basically all the biggest tech companies building AI models in talks with the biggest Media publishers to come a strike financial deals about how they might be compensated for the use of news content because they have to scrape news websites in order to learn and what happens when you ask them a question about a newstalk I can they generate an answer.

That's essentially generating journalism, but kind of stepping Google the sources that they used to train themselves because I did read that the Daily Mail is looking at potentially suing Google taking legal action over the scraping of its news articles, I think.

And everybody's wise to it.

I didn't we named musical.

Axel Springer the New York Times the Guardian all of these we know they have been in discussions around you know do they pay you a cheque do they build something are you still there are definitely going to be partnerships that will have some kind of financial shape to them.

It is nothing to do you want to come in.

Yeah.

I think that's something as well that I've been thinking a lot about in terms of the business model is that somebody might be very good point magazine about what Google's doing now.

If this is something that exacerbates what's already happening in terms of the business model in terms of news organisations going under the data left to scrape.

It's all well and good having news publishers for the date of they've already straight and giving them some sort of the ongoing payment, but if this is sidestep people going to news websites.

You know he has done a really really good job now and subscriptions the Guardian has done a really good job subscriptions if people stop going to websites and instead just end up looking at either.

Google has basically summarised a bunch of news articles, then it damages the business model even more those journalist probably get sacked in even greater numbers than they're already been sacked and then there's nobody reduce the data in the first place for Google to then be making you happy.

We keep mentioning Google and obviously there are lots of other organisations allegedly doing this as well.

I just do explain what you were at the moment.

You might go into research and can you put in a question and it'll come up with a whole load of different articles you can choose to read in the future.

It'll be a one-stop-shop the summary of all those articles and that's what's different with talking the implications of this is something you're worried about absolutely this thing.

I most worried about is a digital publisher.

I mean from my point of view we know that nine out of ten people use Google right so basically all the internet search Google right now still and although Google says that it has this idea that if it's summarises something it all provide link so you can go deeper I think we know that the behaviour of

Is not to try and go that deep the second page of Google's hardly ever clicked on so we already know that summarising those articles gonna take away a lot of this traffic and digital publications product by how much search traffic they get I know that scene is Google traffic is like a big chunk of where we get our eyeballs from its predominantly through Google the business model gets broke summarising and what are the digital publications going to do especially very very new stuff and that's why I in peace argued like we should not be allowing this to we just we should have some sort of moratorium on how quickly these models can suck up data.

I don't see any other way to prevent some of this from happening.

I think we're coming towards the end.

I would like to end by just looking to the Future we touched on it through the program is journalism doomed or is the debate about a eyes application and user pausing actually a reminder of the value of?

Tom Clarke from Sky News if you don't get this right, I think there is a kind of existential crisis for information without touching Microsoft which invested is invested 100 billion in the company that generated Chatham tg4 they've already put that into being as you can effectively use a surgeon the way that we were describing already and they are weird to be there in a couple of weeks ago committed to continuous.

Do they do not want to see this is what really troubles me the more ai-generated content we put on the way without knowing whether it's accurate or not the more data.

There is out there to scrape for the what's the future if we don't somehow managed to step in and separate.

What is true or you and generated when we get to a point where I actually feeding the I will AI generated stuff.

We might end up very very short order.

It don't forget how much you pass wind up polluting the Wellspring of the information that goes and buys.

The restarts, I think there's a real crisis there, but there are also very important questions about how we can use these tools to make a jobs better soon.

We survive this new gavel information.

So powerful be doing investigations for freeing up time.

It is done in the right way getting stories out there faster.

So I think AI tools have enormous potential in use that we must have a look and Maddie Maddie from the finance another way of me asking the question.

I just asked Tom was you know the moment AI journalism can't go out an interview people it can't make follow-up calls, but will it one day? What's your expectation of where it will go in terms of its sophistication as it is moving very quickly, so yes, it's going to get more sophisticated fewer errors, but I I mean my view is that they'll be a separation as people become more educated about the fact that most of the rubbish and has more of that exist and people start to see that.

There's a space for quality journalism to emergency hey where the people.

Human generated stories and facts we bring you the truth and if that's what you want you come to us trusted sources business model that many other reputable organisations are going for around the world is made in a final well from the Bristol cable in terms of DC jealous out of a job in the next decades, I completely agree with that he said and I think that really just need to ask ourselves what we want.

We want ethical accountable journalism written by humans.

Yes, I think we do and so I think we need to fight for that.

You know we do have a problem with them in the UK and that's something that every newspaper and every journey is trying to remedy and we need to try harder at doing that will be using AI tools no doubt as we already do in pretty much every area of Our Lives what we want really is properly funded any Council journalism so we need to fight for that if that's what we want well.

That is all.

We got time for this week.

Thank you madhumita.

Murgia from the ft Tom Clarke from Sky News is my son from

Cable and Jackson Ryan from CNET and thank you all for listening to the media show will be back next week.

Goodbye.