How Journalists Can Engage With and Use ChatGPT Constructively
ChatGPT, the Open AI software that has gained attention for its ability to generate everything from faulty headlines to shockingly convincing fake news sites, promises to change the future in a dizzying amount of ways. While some of these are completely strange—such as teaching an AI to rap—the nearly limitless possibilities of a technology in its infancy promises some exciting ways forward for working journalists.
ChatGPT is not human—it cannot generate new ideas. It can, however, compile large amounts of data at a speed impossible for humans to accomplish, and generate content based on amalgamations of that information at a similarly quick pace. While this information must be fact-checked as the AI is not able to do that on their own, it can still save plenty of valuable research time for journalists.
One of the most effective time-saving tools AI can provide to a human is its ability to sum up large amounts of text and data in layman’s terms. You can ask the tool to pick up key points, create an outline, or streamline the information in some more consumable way to fit your needs. AI can also find the answers to questions by keying into available online quotes for experts, but Marcela Kunova of Poynter recommends caution on this approach.
“As always, triple-check everything [the AI] comes up with as it cheerfully makes stuff up if it does not know the answer,” Kunova says. “For instance, you can ask it to give you names of experts to interview about a given topic and it generally comes up with sound suggestions. However, if the topic is too niche, the tool may generate totally fictional names that sound like they could be experts from, say, a particular country.”
Another useful tool: AI can translate entire articles into another language immediately. The AI is fairly basic in its translation—similar to the limitations of other popular tools like Google Translate—but can lay out the information in a smaller, more concise space than the faulty click-through translate options that services like Google Translate offer. AI’s advantage over Google Translate is its learning capabilities, which can detect things that Google Translate cannot: including idiomatic patterns, idioms, slang, and other colloquial uses of language. While the technology is still learning and evolving, the future holds great promise.
Journalists can also engage the AI to help with some of the more menial tasks of writing: journalists can ask AI to generate titles for the articles they’re writing, or even have it generate email subject lines and even body text, especially for mass emails that are a pain to create.
“Outsourcing one of the most tedious office tasks to a machine sounds like a dream,” says Kunova. “Although you will need to edit the final version, ChatGPT can speed up the process of emailing your sources or colleagues as you can generate a sound message with one swift prompt. Just fill in the blanks and send it away. A genuine time-saver.”
The AI can also help generate social media posts and will honor requests for specific formats such that asking the AI for a tweet will produce a much different result than asking the AI for a LinkedIn post. Some specific AI are programmed to be sensitive to the shifts in tone between the major social media platforms, and can generate eerily human-like posts. Most likely, journalists will need to make the final edits, but this can save a ton of time.
ChatGPT is not yet advanced enough to produce its own work that can stand alone without input from humans: its writing and structure are faulty, it will fully invent information to fill in its own information gaps, and it can only distill information, not generate the human perspective that consumers crave from journalists. It can certainly function as a helpful tool to help journalists create more work and more content to engage their audiences in less time, though. As the technology evolves, the emergent possibilities will grow more and more exciting.
