Newsbots are Coming for Your Jobs

An old adage went that newsrooms were quiet because reporters were out interviewing people. Then they were quiet because reporters, instead of interviewing people, were silently scanning the Internet for news. With ChatGPT, the chatbot developed by OpenAI, newsrooms will be quiet because there won’t be any reporters. Media companies have been using artificial intelligence (AI) for a while, says a report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. They use it to automate data-driven stories such as financial reports, sports results and economic indicators. They use AI to do data analysis and to spot trends.

But with ChatGPT, media leaders are experimenting with producing news stories and opinion pieces in the voices of particular writers or that mimic the tone of their own publications. Meanwhile, the number of AI-based “newsrooms” is multiplying. A report this week from NewsGuard, a news rating site, identified 49 “news outlets” with stories on politics, health, tech, entertainment, etc., which is clearly produced by chatbots like ChatGPT and possibly Google’s Bard. Although these sites boast news organisation-like names such as the Daily Business Post and Market News Reports, they are actually content farms, i.e., websites churning out sketchy clickbait content for ads.

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