Tech giants spent the first few months of 2023pumping out AI chatbots, with Google taking its biggest swing in the AI wars with a flurry of new AI-powered capabilities for its Workspace apps. For instance, Gmail has agenerative feature that writes email drafts for youby taking older emails in the thread into account. Google Docs' “Help me write” tool has also been amassive help in quickly composing generic textfor things like job descriptions, which would otherwise take a while to finish. The search giant has now found yet another place it can cram in generative AI: the newsroom.
According to a report byThe New York Times, Google is in talks with major media organizations, such as The Washington Post, News Corp, and The NYT itself, to test an AI tool for writing news articles (viaThe Verge). Known as “Genesis,” the utility is marketed as a personal assistant for journalists that can serve as a “responsible tool” in producing news content, the report says. Having said that, Genesis appears to be vastly different fromBard.
Journalists will be able to feed details about current events into the system, which will then automatically generate content. But Google doesn’t want Genesis to be seen as a replacement for human journalists (at least for the time being). Instead, it is only meant to help automate certain tasks, allowing journalists to focus on what is most important to them. The Mountain View-based company assures as much in a tweet.
Google wants to provide journalists with options for headlines and different writing styles, for example. However, some executives mentioned in the report found the AI tool unsettling as it seemed to ignore the efforts that human journalists and editors make to produce accurate news stories.
While Google is in the early stages of exploring the idea of AI-generated news content, the idea of entrusting editorial tasks to AI machines carries significant risks, primarily due to the unreliable nature of AI when it comes to ensuring accuracy.
More concerning, Genesis may pose a threat to journalists and editors who bear significant editorial responsibilities. As it stands, this burgeoning technology has already caused disruptions in newsrooms, with Germany’s Bild tabloid havingrecently laid off hundreds of employeesgiven the opportunities presented by AI.
