AI is getting smarter and smarter, thanks to the increasingly powerful hardware, better designed software, and more data to be trained on.
And thanks to these advancements, Google wants to do something that has never done before: using AI to help journalists research and write news articles.
To pitch this idea, Google is working with various media outlets, particularly with small publishers, to provide AI-powered tools to assist journalists with "options for headlines or different writing styles."
According to Google spokeswoman Jenn Crider in a statement, this is described as company’s "earliest stages of exploring ideas":
News is information about current events and situations.
While news can be delivered through many different media: word of mouth, printing, postal systems, broadcasting, electronic communication, or through the testimony of observers and witnesses to events, news can be traced back to the early days human communications.
This is why the news sector, has long been human-made, human-curated, and targeted towards human.
Whatever biases that can happen, they all happen because of the writers or the journalists themselves, who made put their own preferences or opinions above facts.
Google is the tech titan of the web and beyond.
Google has traditionally played the bigger role of curating information and sending users to publishers’ websites to read more. And on the web, there is little that can really compete with Google.
With the attempt to change the way news is created, the announcement quickly sent waves across the media industry.
A number of people start to debate about the risks and benefits of AI-powered platforms, like ChatGPT, which has stunned users with its ability to mimic human speech but raised concerns about copyright infringement, misinformation and the replacement of human workers.
Making things worrisome, the announcement from Google came when the global media industry has been decimated by successive rounds of layoffs amid a collapse in print advertising revenues.
It was The New York Times that first reported on Google’s development of the tool, known as Genesis, which the publication said has been pitched towards news organizations.
The tool in question can take in information, like current events, for example, and then generate news content from that, the people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the product.
One of the three people familiar with the product, said that Google believed the technology could serve as a kind of personal assistant for journalists, helping its human users automate some redundant tasks to free up time for others.
The goal is to help steer the publishing industry away from the pitfalls of generative AIs.
At the time, some news executives from large publications Google pitched the project to, described it as "unsettling."
If the technology can really deliver factual information reliably, journalists should clearly benefit from the tool, said experts.
On the other hand, if it behaves not like intended, or if journalists can misuse it, the technology could damage the credibility not only of the tool, but of the news organizations that use it.
While some news publications have started using generative AIs to create articles, the articles remain a tiny fraction of their human-generated posts.
If Genesis is to take off, experts suggest that posts created by the AI should be properly edited and checked, in order to ensure that the posts won't spread misinformation and affect how traditionally written stories are perceived.
Previously, publishers and other content creators have criticized Google and other major AI companies for using the internet itself as their source of training materials.
This is because the internet's content Google and others are devouring, include decades of their articles and posts, and that the companies are using them to train their AI without compensating the publishers.
Some news organizations have taken a position against the AIs, trying to prevent them from reading their data without permission.
