AI technology is improving every day and while it offers loads of Promise some see it as a threat to jobs that have been held by humans well those concerns may be coming to this industry journalism and news media AI generated news is an emerging field that brings with it both convenience and concern I'm joined Now by Joe Amditis assistant director of products and events at the Center for Cooperative Media, who looks at the pros and cons of AI news technology Joe thanks so much for being here with us today there's an emerging field right now of AI reporting journalism that's happening a company called local lens right here in the state how does this reporting work well so if you want to call it reporting you can but essentially what's happening is these large language models these Bots these chat Bots are scraping public meeting transcripts a lot of them you know streamed on YouTube or they're scraping PDFs and public records and they're generating summaries and you know key takeaway points and things like that with some variations depending on which Outlet is employing them and the goal is at least as it's stated is to provide a sort of starting point for reporters who may not know that a story even existed or that a conversation was had and then they can search through these summaries to give themselves a better idea of where to go and what questions to ask and where to follow up that's at least the purported intent of them so one of the things that's key in journalism we know is fact checking what are the some of the concerns as it relates to AI technology and thoughts writing news and and that fact check day fact checking possibly not existing well in the case of local lens it doesn't exist at all and I spoke with one of the co-founders yesterday about this and they do not edit the copy at all that the Bots produce they just run it on the site uh if there's a complaint or you know someone wants to have them make a correction they said they'll go in and do it if it's bad which is probably the more one of the more egregious examples that we've seen of these kind of uh tools being employed in the field of content and journalism specifically but I mean essentially with any publication if you are using these tools in an insistive capacity for instance helping you to sort of augment the work of your reporters you're still held to the same standards regardless of whether or not you get the text from a freelancer that you've worked with or haven't worked with or you get it from a bot you still have to be able to stand by everything that you publish as a journalist as a news organization as an editor so at that level nothing has really changed it's just that these tools are not meant to generate truth they are meant to predict and produce the most likely next word or set of words and that is it it's just glorified you know autocorrect and uh you know whatever the the next word is supposed to be but is the average reader viewer consumer of this news AI news Savvy enough to understand that and as you said it needs to be the reader sometimes who's calling out the errors well in the case of local lens yes it's entirely on them and they they state that right at the bottom of the website everything on this website is generated by a computer um but you know essentially I don't want to I don't want to assume that the reader doesn't understand what's going on but I think what's more likely is that they just don't have time to investigate the veracity of every statement they read on the internet and that's been true before the Bots came around and started doing this so ultimately not much has changed in that department on the flip side of this there is a need for more local political news coverage as we see news outlets shrinking where does AI fit in that space well you've got two parts of this so on the one hand these tools certainly can help journalists and reporters and editors Focus Less on the boring monotonous sort of everyday tasks that are you know just sort of automatable and hopefully the goal of using these tools will be to give them more time to focus on serving the communities that they cover and that is the ideal sort of utopian you know expectation but of course you know when you work for a for-profit company and the person in charge of that for-profit company or people in charge see that more as a cost cutting and cost saving measure we've seen this before it's just going to end up being another do-more with less kind of situation and that is what has most journalists concerned yeah a lot to talk about Joe MD to Center for Cooperative media thank you so much thank you so much for having me much for having me [Music]