Yes. I would agree with you there.
I’m sure, although I’ve never done it, that when I look at all the investigative reporting we’ve done, which is reporting that takes months and sometimes years of work to produce one story, it would be very arduous to justify all those expenses, wouldn’t it?
But I think society sometimes doesn’t know how much institutions like ours think about civic good. I truly believe, like our Founding Fathers, despite all the fault lines, the Founding Fathers agreed that free people need a free press and that a country that wants to govern itself needs access to independent and reliable information.
Jefferson said that given the choice between a government without a press and a press without a government, he would not hesitate to choose the press. That’s because this work really matters to society.
Journalism is very often just how you know what you know. Moving on to AI, this is how AI knows what it knows.
Yes, let’s get to it. In the context of artificial intelligence in journalism, I divide it into two segments. With WIRED, there’s reporting on this technological moment in time, which is really significant. Then there is a separate issue, although we also raise it, about how artificial intelligence will impact the practice of journalism and the consumption of journalism.
I mean, there are some really tricky lines to walk here, and I’m curious what The Times thinks about it.
I guess my philosophy is that very rarely in life do you have to be first. There is a risk of switching to novel technology too quickly. And it probably carries more risk than waiting, watching, learning, studying, and quietly experimenting behind the scenes. I think you’ve seen some of these threats, right? For example, think about the news organizations that, in my opinion, incredibly stupidly, have decided to simply hand over full responsibility for writing and publishing stories to AI. Mistakes were made.
Mistakes were made. And bugs were published.
That’s true. And not only were errors published, but fraudulent journalists were invented. This was a completely predictable and unnecessary set of mistakes. People are responsible for everything we produce, period. There’s something about artificial intelligence that makes people forget it’s a tool.
Well, he’s a very good conversation partner.
But when my colleagues say, “Well, what if the AI makes a mistake?” I say, “Well, your job is to find that error and remove it from your work.” You would never ask this about a computer. What if the computer makes a mistake?
Well, you have to find it, right? I consider it a reporting tool. That’s why we utilize it much more for reporting than for writing, creating and editing.
I think AI is very good at detecting patterns and anomalies in gigantic data sets. In many ways, this is a pretty good summary of much of the reporting. You know, campaign finance reporting basically talks about patterns, how the mix of donors changes to Republicans and Democrats, gigantic donors to compact donors, and then anomalies.