The New York Times Embraces AI

Along with approving several AI tools for staff use, NYT has built its own chatbot and is rolling it out to reporters, editors, and other employees in hopes of optimizing its processes.

Why It Hits: The storied publisher, which is one of the few major papers not to have a licensing deal with one of the major AI companies, is currently suing OpenAI and Amazon for allegedly scraping its content without permission. So, it’s safe to say that NYT has never been pro-AI. But the rollout of its own chatbot shows that it’s not allergic to the tech — it just wants it to be used ethically.

Between the Lines: NYT would like to introduce you to its newest employee: “Echo.”

• Staff will be able to use the tool for “summarizing articles, briefings, and other company activity,” according to The Verge.
• The company’s new guidelines “encourage newsroom employees to use it to suggest edits and revisions for their work and generate summaries, promotional copy for social media, and SEO headlines.”
• They can also use Echo to “develop news quizzes, quote cards, and FAQs or suggest what questions reporters should ask a start-up’s CEO during an interview.” (Clearly, the company wants to go broad in AI’s implementation.)

The Future: Despite all the allowances, the company has told staff they shouldn’t use AI to “draft or significantly alter an article, circumvent paywalls, input third-party copyrighted materials, or publish AI-generated images or videos without explicit labeling.” That’s because NYT has promised that “Times journalism will always be reported, written, and edited by our expert journalists” … with the understanding that “generative AI can sometimes help with parts of our process.”

In other words… AI is here to stay, so we better figure out how to implement it correctly. Building an LLM in-house may just be the best way to do that.