Gannett is introducing AI-generated summaries at the top of journalists' stories. From The Verge:

The AI feature, labeled “key points” on stories, uses automated technology to create summaries that appear below a headline. The bottom of articles includes a disclaimer, reading, “The Key Points at the top of this article were created with the assistance of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and reviewed by a journalist before publication. No other parts of the article were generated using AI.” The memo is dated May 14th and notes that participation is optional at this point.

The report says the summaries are already in use, such as on this USA Today story about mosquitoes. It looks like this:

Thin end of the wedge? Maybe — but I think tentative uses like this can be useful for journalists who have completed the (hard, human-powered) reporting and are now just doing page decorations which, let’s face it, are as much about attracting Google as anything else.

But this additional passage in The Verge’s reporting gives me pause:

The AI-generated summary “aims to enhance the reporting process and elevate the audience experience,” according to the memo, which also states that the AI model that powers the tool was trained in-house over nine months.

“The document speaks for itself,” Gannett spokesperson Lark-Marie Anton said in an email.

If newspaper groups are going to do this, they need to be as transparent as their readers as possible. At the bare minimum: A full editorial, explaining the technology, the rationale for using it, and how they plan to monitor quality. Readers finding out via leaked memo? Not appropriate.

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At its annual developers' conference, Google announced the roll-out of "AI Overviews." From the New York Times:

Starting this week, [Google CEO Sundar Pichai] said, U.S. users will see a feature, A.I. Overviews, that generates information summaries above traditional search results. By the end of the year, more than a billion people will have access to the technology.

This could be extremely damaging to publishers. So called "zero clicks" -- where a user gets what they need from a Google results page without needing to click through to the source -- are expected to grow rapidly as Google reorients its search engine to compete with ChatGPT et al.

From the Washington Post:

‍The rollout threatens the survival of the millions of creators and publishers who rely on the service for traffic. Some experts argue the addition of AI will boost the tech giant’s already tight grip on the internet, ultimately ushering in a system where information is provided by just a handful of large companies.

Google calls its AI answers “overviews” but they often just paraphrase directly from websites. One search for how to fix a leaky toilet provided an AI answer with several tips, including tightening tank bolts. At the bottom of the answer, Google linked to The Spruce, a home improvement and gardening website owned by web publisher Dotdash Meredith, which also owns Investopedia and Travel + Leisure. Google’s AI tips lifted a phrase from The Spruce’s article word-for-word.

Relatedly, it looks like Apple is prepping to do the same, with no dialogue with publishers, the UK media trade mag Press Gazette reports:

The changes could not only stop publishers from supporting their content with advertising on Apple devices, but they could mean Apple summarises articles for readers without need for them to click on the page.

No UK publishers, and no one outside of Apple, has yet seen the tech giant’s new “web eraser” and AI text summary tools, but they are likely to be launched on Apple devices later this year, sources tell Press Gazette.

The New York Times has announced the line-up for its AI Initiatives Team. Its head, Zach Seward, writes:

In the next month, our team will also be making certain gen-A.I. tools available to a pilot group of journalists, to experiment with their own work and start understanding how the technology is and isn’t helpful. More details, along with training and guidance for everyone using the tools, are coming soon.

Read the full post.

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A terrific investigation by Maggie Harrison Dupre at Futurism delves into AdVon, the AI company that rose to prominence when it emerged it had produced content for Sports Illustrated and USA Today.

The piece is worth reading and digesting in full. It goes into detail about the capabilities of these tools as it stands today. What’s most alarming is the breadth of publications that AdVon is said to have worked with. Dupre writes:

We found the company's phony authors and their work everywhere from celebrity gossip outlets like Hollywood Life and Us Weekly to venerable newspapers like the Los Angeles Times, the latter of which also told us that it had broken off its relationship with AdVon after finding its work unsatisfactory.

And after we sent detailed questions about this story to McClatchy, a large publisher of regional newspapers, it also ended its relationship with AdVon and deleted hundreds of its pieces — bylined by at least 14 fake authors — from more than 20 of its papers, ranging from the Miami Herald to the Sacramento Bee.

And it may be even more widespread than that:

An earlier, archived version of its site bragged that its publishing clients included the Ziff Davis titles PC Magazine, Mashable and AskMen (Ziff Davis didn't respond to questions about this story) as well as Hearst's Good Housekeeping (Hearst didn't respond to questions either) and IAC's Dotdash Meredith publications People, Parents, Food & Wine, InStyle, Real Simple, Travel + Leisure, Better Homes & Gardens and Southern Living (IAC confirmed that Meredith had a relationship with AdVon prior to its 2021 acquisition by Dotdash, but said it'd since ended the partnership.)

The good news is — it seems just about every publication that tried AdVon decided the quality was not good enough. The bad news is so many seemed willing to try, and the technology will only get better when more serious AI players turn their attention to a bespoke tool to write “journalism.”

Here’s another thought: Dotdash Meredith this week announced it had reached a content deal with OpenAI. Surely at some point the dog catches its tail here? Those content deals won’t last for long if publications start publishing AI generated articles. The value is the human.

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Cade Metz and Tiffany Hsu writing in the New York Times:

As experts warn that images, audio and video generated by artificial intelligence could influence the fall elections, OpenAI is releasing a tool designed to detect content created by its own popular image generator, DALL-E. But the prominent A.I. start-up acknowledges that this tool is only a small part of what will be needed to fight so-called deepfakes in the months and years to come.

While touted as a tool aimed at disinformation researchers, it will clearly be of use to newsrooms facing a deluge of fakery:

OpenAI said its new detector could correctly identify 98.8 percent of images created by DALL-E 3, the latest version of its image generator. But the company said the tool was not designed to detect images produced by other popular generators like Midjourney and Stability.

From The Verge:

Dotdash Meredith, publisher of People, Better Homes & Gardens, Investopedia, Food & Wine, and InStyle, signed a deal on Tuesday with OpenAI to use AI models for its ad-targeting product, D/Cipher. In turn, Dotdash Meredith will license its content to ChatGPT.

With the partnership, OpenAI will bring content from Dotdash Meredith publications to ChatGPT, link to the articles in the chatbot, and train AI models with its articles. (Presumably, this also includes an archive of all the previous sexiest men alive.)

This agreement, one of a flurry made recently, is interesting in that it gives a glimpse of how a deal with OpenAI might have added value beyond just taking money for content. From Dotdash's press release:

As part of the agreement, OpenAI's models will help DDM's groundbreaking intent-based ad-targeting solution D/Cipher. D/Cipher connects advertisers directly to consumers based on the context of content being consumed, without using personal identifiers like cookies. As strategic partners, OpenAI technology will be used to supercharge D/Cipher's superior targeting technology with AI—offering more precise targeting and improved ad performance in a soon-to-be cookieless world.

Deep in the quagmire of mounting legal challenges, OpenAI on Tuesday announced it was working on a tool that would give rights holders greater say over how their content is used.

From OpenAI's statement:

OpenAI is developing Media Manager, a tool that will enable creators and content owners to tell us what they own and specify how they want their works to be included or excluded from machine learning research and training. Over time, we plan to introduce additional choices and features.

This will require cutting-edge machine learning research to build a first-ever tool of its kind to help us identify copyrighted text, images, audio, and video across multiple sources and reflect creator preferences. We’re collaborating with creators, content owners, and regulators as we develop Media Manager.

Our goal is to have the tool in place by 2025, and we hope it will set a standard across the AI industry.

Given the pace of AI development, and the disruption it is already causing, 2025 seems a long way off. But it is a complex problem. (TechCrunch's Kyle Wiggers has more.)

The details will matter here. Firstly, it seems the onus will be on content owners to be proactive in making OpenAI aware of what they own (similar to the model of YouTube and others). As the number of AI tools and large language models grows, keeping on top of all the companies that might want to use your data will be no easy task (and that's just the good actors).

Second, it doesn't do much about all the material that has already been hoovered up by the training of these models.

The company also highlighted efforts it says it is making to better link through to sources of information when appropriate -- another gripe of content creators:

We’re continuously making our products more useful discovery engines. We recently improved source links in ChatGPT(opens in a new window) to give users better context and web publishers new ways to connect with our audiences. We’re also working with partners to display their content in our products and increase their connection to readers.

We’ve announced partnerships with global news publishers from the Financial Times, to Le Monde, Prisa Media, Axel Springer and more, to display their content in ChatGPT and enrich the user experience on news topics. More innovation is on the way. This content may also be used to train ChatGPT to better surface relevant publisher content to users and to improve our tools for newsrooms.

Will this be enough to fend off the legal challenges? Probably not. But it may go some way in convincing some publishers that collaboration may be more fruitful than confrontation.

Among the various winners of this year's Pulitzer Prize for journalism, announced this week, there was one that deserves special mention here.

The staff at the New York Times won in the category of International Reporting for "its wide-ranging and revelatory coverage of Hamas’ lethal attack in southern Israel on October 7, Israel’s intelligence failures and the Israeli military’s sweeping, deadly response in Gaza."

Included in the body of work was this remarkable investigation into the impact of bombing in South Gaza. In December, Zach Seward, the NYT's head of AI initiatives, explained on Threads:

The New York Times visual investigations team trained a pattern-recognition algorithm on satellite imagery from southern Gaza to identify more than 200 craters from highly destructive, 2,000-pound bombs dropped by Israel in the “safe zone” where it encouraged civilians to flee.

Reacting to the Prize win, Seward said the work "augurs a new frontier of computer-assisted reporting." He gave a presentation on this work, and many other AI initiatives, at the SxSW Festival in Austin back in March. Nieman Lab published the transcript here.

News industry divides over AI. Sara Fischer delves into the implications of news orgs getting into bed with AI companies with content licensing deals. Axios

AI Movies Aren’t Just a Gimmick Anymore. Rachel Metz reports on the second annual AI film festival, held in downtown LA last week. In short: this year’s films are much better than last’s. Bloomberg

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When X's AI bot Grok mentioned a specific TIME story but did not link through to it, Alex Kantrowicz at Big Technology wondered what was up. He dropped Elon Musk an email, and Musk duly responded.

Kantrowicz writes:

Musk said better citations are coming, but shared a deeper vision for the product, which he wants to build into a real-time synthesizer of news and social media reaction. Effectively, his plan is to use AI to combine breaking news and social commentary around big stories, present the compilation live, and allow you to go deeper via chat.

“As more information becomes available, the news summary will update to include that information,” Musk told me. “The goal is simple: to provide maximally accurate and timely information, citing the most significant sources.”

Read the full story

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Mike Masnick is well known in tech policy circles as an extremely astute commentator, not afraid to dive in -- at considerable length -- to a wonky discussion on the minutiae of any proposed law or action. (His TechDirt profile suggests he has written more than 50,000 posts.)

Given the onslaught of regulations on tech companies lately, he's been busy, but thankfully not too busy to write this extremely detailed piece on how he uses AI to aid his work. He focuses on Lex.page - an AI tool that runs on GPT but actually pre-dates ChatGPT. (I wrote a column about it for the FT in November 2022.)

Masnick writes:

Almost every case I’ve heard of journalistic outfits using AI are examples of the dumbest fucking ways to use the technology. That’s because addle-brained finance and tech bros think that AI is a tool to replace journalists. And every time you do that, it’s going to flop, often in embarrassing ways.

However, I have been using some AI tools over the last few months and have found them to be quite useful, namely, in helping me write better. I think the best use of AI is in making people better at their jobs. So I thought I would describe one way in which I’ve been using AI. And, no, it’s not to write articles.

It’s basically to help me brainstorm, critique my articles, and make suggestions on how to improve them.

The post details how he uses Lex.page's assistant function to help tighten his work. He asks it to assess the clarity and whether his points have been substantiated. It then asks it anything is "missing" - i.e. any aspect of the subject matter the AI thinks is worth mentioning. He says:

I don’t always agree with its suggestions, but it often makes me think carefully about the arguments I’m making and seeing how well they stand up. I have strengthened many of the things I say based on the responses from Lex that just get me to think more carefully about what’s written.

Read the full story

From the New York Times:

Eight daily newspapers owned by Alden Global Capital sued OpenAI and Microsoft on Tuesday, accusing the tech companies of illegally using news articles to power their A.I. chatbots.

The publications — The New York Daily News, The Chicago Tribune, The Orlando Sentinel, The Sun Sentinel of Florida, The San Jose Mercury News, The Denver Post, The Orange County Register and The St. Paul Pioneer Press — filed the complaint in federal court in the U.S. Southern District of New York. All are owned by MediaNews Group or Tribune Publishing, subsidiaries of Alden, the country’s second-largest newspaper operator.

It comes a day after the Financial Times reached a content deal with OpenAI. It's clear a dividing line is being drawn: either get into bed with the AI companies, or be ready to take them to court.

The Alden case has similarities with the separate lawsuit being brought by the NYT:

The [Alden] complaint said the chatbots regularly surfaced the entire text of articles behind subscription paywalls for users and often did not prominently link back to the source. This, it said, reduced the need for readers to pay subscriptions to support local newspapers and deprived the publishers of revenue both from subscriptions and from licensing their content elsewhere.

Read the full story