Google pitches AI that could help produce news

Google is in discussions with news publishers about building and selling artificial intelligence tools that could help reporters and editors produce written journalism, a potential major acceleration of the practice of using automated tools to produce news content.

Google has been presenting the tools to news outlets since early spring, according to news executives present for meetings or later briefed on them. The product was pitched as possibly being able to collect information as part of newsgathering, write an early draft of a news story, and handle post-production elements like writing social media posts, according to one executive who sat in on a pitch, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter. Google suggested that the tool would be most appealing to local publishers.

News outlets are grappling with the latest “generative” AI tools like Bard from Google and ChatGPT from OpenAI that can write human-sounding text on any topic based on simple prompts and questions. Some news publishers have already employed the bots to speed up their ability to write lots of content quickly, spurring anxiety and anger from human writers. But the tools still make up false information and pass it off as factual, something AI experts say is an inherent part of how the technology works, raising doubts whether it can ever be trusted to write news stories.

“We have seen large-language models like ChatGPT and Bard produce factually incorrect information. Unleashing these models in the critical, and often time-crunched, field of journalism seems premature,” said Hany Farid, a computer science professor at the University of California at Berkeley and a member of its Artificial Intelligence Lab.

Jenn Crider, a Google spokesperson, confirmed the company was in discussions with news outlets with a focus on small publishers. The tools could provide different options for headlines or writing styles, with the goal of speeding up and improving how journalists work, Crider said. She compared the tools to AI features the company is adding to Gmail and Google Docs that automatically write emails, resumes or memos based on short prompts and questions entered by a human.