AI


useful tool?


particular accuracy, impartiality, fairness and privacy. In all cases, where AI is used for editorial, a senior editorial figure is responsible for overseeing its deployment and continuing use.


The guidelines draw special attention to two potentially


problematic areas. First is algorithmic bias; journalists are reminded that the outcomes produced by AI are only as good as whatever has been inputted in the first place by flawed humans. Second is hallucinations: generative AI operates on a probability basis, giving what is the ‘most likely’ response to a question or an instruction. Sometimes that ‘most likely’ response isn’t correct. The BBC has announced two pilot projects: At-a-Glance Summaries using AI to bullet point stories, something The Independent is already doing with Google Gemini. The other project is called Style-Assist. Matthew Eltringham is senior adviser on editorial policy for the BBC. “The majority of the AI that we are looking at is to make our content go further, to do things that we wouldn’t be able to do otherwise,” he says. “In World Service, we are translating copy. Style-Assist will enable us to use more content generated by the BBC’s local democracy reporter scheme. There’s a lot of raw copy that we don’t use because we don’t have the bodies to be able to turn it around.” Style Assist uses a BBC-trained smart AI system that has


‘read’ thousands of BBC articles so it can amend text quickly, matching the BBC’s house style. Any stories going through


this large language model will be reviewed by a senior BBC journalist for accuracy and clarity. A near-futurist might suggest that an agentic AI system


Sources


BBC guidelines on AI use: http://bit.ly/4n4XV3Q


would be able to take the minutes of all council meetings across the country, write them up as stories and list them in order of importance without any human interaction at all. The only thing stopping that is the time it takes for councils to release those minutes. Eltringham is keen to


MIT on the energy consumption of AI searches:


https://tinyurl.com/yvdvtcdv Reuters survey:


https://bit.ly/3HEWaLN


point out that, at the BBC, generative AI is never used to create content, only to re-version or rewrite. “We will use AI to help us crunch data


to analyse documents, possibly to summarise documents, to transcribe, to assist. What we won’t do is use it to direct


journalism. We won’t let AI come up with questions for interview.”


Why not?


“We think humans are better than AI at coming up with questions and we need to keep editorial independence. However sophisticated and nuanced your prompt is, the information it is giving you back is based on the algorithm and the training data. Subcontracting that is not something we are particularly keen on at the moment. Also, we think it is massively deskilling. Younger journalists would be learning how to use AI, but not how to do the journalism.” Steve Bird is head of the NUJ’s


chapel at the Financial Times Group. He agrees there should be a dividing line between assisting journalism and creating content. “The FT has been


conscientious about how AI is used and rolled out. It is focused on supporting journalism rather than the bottom line.” So how is it used in practice?


“One of the easiest wins for us was with picture captioning. Alt text is used on images to help visually impaired


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