The New York Times is adopting AI tools in its newsroom, reportedly encouraging journalists to use AI to suggest headlines, make edits, and suggest potential questions for interviews.
The US publication has reportedly given the green light on the use of AI tools in its newsroom, including an internal solution called Echo, according to Semafor.
Staff have reportedly received editorial guidelines on how they should use Echo and other AI tools and will receive more in-depth training on how to use them.
Other tools open for use include Amazon AI tools, GitHub Copilot, Google Vertex AI, NotebookLM, NYT’s ChatExplorer and OpenAI’s non-ChatGPT API.
The publication permits the use of AI tools for editing, summarising, coding, and writing, and will also be utilised to generate summaries of content, copy for social media, and SEO-friendly headlines.
The outlined rules reportedly prohibit staff from using AI to draft or significantly alter an article, get past a paywall, using third-party copyrighted works, or publish AI-generated image or video without labelling.
Despite this adoption, The Times has said that AI copy will continue to be vetted by its journalists.
“Any use of generative A.I. in the newsroom must begin with factual information vetted by our journalists and, as with everything else we produce, must be reviewed by editors,” the publication said in its ‘Principles for Using Gen AI’ in the newsroom.
Numerous publications are at odds with AI platforms. Last week, a group of publishers including The Guardian, Vox Media, and Condé Nast announced they are suing AI startup Cohere for using their content to train AI models.
The Times is also in an ongoing legal battle with OpenAI and Microsoft for alleged copyright infringement.
