Back to Main
This Week in AI — 📰 Microsoft wants AI to save journalism
AI

This Week in AI — 📰 Microsoft wants AI to save journalism

February 6, 2024 | By: Dave Isaac

Headlines You Should Know

 

Microsoft Wants to Use AI to Save Journalism

As a former reporter, it’s been painful to watch the bloodletting in newsrooms across the country over the past few weeks. Any journalist knows that job security is nonexistent in that field, but that doesn’t make it any easier to digest more than 500 people losing their jobs in January. This includes cuts at niche outlets like TechCrunch, which ended its subscription product, and the shuttering of entire publications like The Messenger, which lasted only eight months.

Yesterday, Microsoft announced plans to help build the “newsroom of the future” (please excuse any current or former journalist whose eyes roll into the back of their head like a slot machine at that phrase) through a series of partnerships built on generative AI. We’ve seen newsrooms try AI on their own — Sports Illustrated and Gannett were both raked over the coals for creating fake reporter personas that pumped out AI content. Predictable, repetitive AI content.

Microsoft’s plan is more detailed. It puts AI tools in the hands of real humans via partnerships with Semafor, the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, the Online News Association, the GroundTruth Project, and tech startup Nota. It’s seemingly an olive branch during a time when journalism doesn’t seem to mesh with AI (see: NYT v. OpenAI). Microsoft’s blog post acknowledges that “fact-based news is inextricably linked to healthy democracies, thriving communities, and civic participation.” 

This will be less about pumping out content as quickly as possible and more about giving journalists new tools to work with since they are always expected to do more with less. We’ve seen AI have a positive impact on content creation for PR pros and marketers. Let’s hope the same can happen for journalists, too. 

Elsewhere …

Tips and Tricks

💻 How to prompt in 2024

What’s happening: For more than a year, we’ve been typing into that little narrow box at the bottom of ChatGPT. What worked in the early days likely doesn’t today, so it’s worth going back to the basics on effective prompting. The technology may be moving fast, but there are still no silver bullets. If you’re waiting for the one prompt to rule them all … don’t hold your breath. You still have to do some work manually to get a good AI output.

What works today: If you found a trick in the past — users had varying success telling ChatGPT “my career depends on this” or offering it a $200 tip to get improved results — they probably no longer have the same effect. Large language models like ChatGPT’s change all the time.

You may not have to do as much explaining of basic concepts in your prompts as in the early days, but you still need to offer some level of direction. If you want a blog post, for instance, you may need to give your AI tool of choice some structure for how you want that blog post to look, what topics you want to be covered, or points you want to be included. Be thoughtful in what you’re asking for and if there’s something you don’t want, say that, too.

Try this: If you’re a paying customer of ChatGPT, one of the biggest differences from a few months ago is to offer instructions on which capability you want, like web browsing, DALL·E 3, or plugins. Aside from that, there are five elements you should include in your prompt to get a quality output:

  • Put the AI tool in the shoes of the author so it knows what role to play.
  • Tell it who the audience is.
  • Give as much relevant information as possible.
  • Instruct it on the top messages to include in the output.
  • Explain the tone you want the content to have.

Quote of the Week

“Working directly with newsrooms, universities, journalists, and industry groups, we will help these organizations use AI to grow audiences, streamline time-consuming tasks in the newsroom, and build sustainable business operations. Our goal is to support thriving, sustainable newsrooms with the technology they need to perform the essential function of informing the world.”

— Noreen Gillespie, Journalism Director at Microsoft, in a blog post about the company’s new collaborations