According to a human-created story by Dan O’Brien, editor of Metrowest Daily News, several Boston-area news publications use artificial intelligence to generate articles for their websites.
In the story, O’Brien mentions Metrowest Daily News, Milford Daily News and Wicked Local. It uses an artificial intelligence tool called espresso, and is “designed to draft sophisticated articles from community announcements.” O’Brien said reporter Beth McDermott is already using the generator AI tool and has posted multiple signatures on the local outlet website.
Requests for interviews with local papers were featured by a spokesperson for Gannett Corporation Communications & Public Relations. In a statement, the company confirmed to GBH News that McDermott is a real person.
“Utilizing AI allows us to expand coverage and allow journalists to focus on more detailed reporting,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “With human surveillance at every step, AI-assisted reports meet standards of quality and accuracy, providing readers with more valuable content that has always been associated with the USA Today network.”
McDermott’s AI Assist Story states that “journalists were involved in every step of the information gathering, reviewing, editing and publishing process,” linking to Gannett’s ethical standards of conduct, calling it a “useful tool,” leaving the use of AI tools to the editors and reporters.
But Bert Herman, the headmaster and principal of Media Innovation’s nonprofit hacking hacker, doesn’t believe most readers will actually review their ethical policies.
“People are saying AI reporters so they’re going to distrust this,” he said, adding that readers will not answer all their questions even if they look at the entire policy. For example, the policy is widely written to apply to all media owned by all Gannett, so it is not mentioned in story-specific details. Readers don’t know how much McDermott used AI, and how many stories she used from her own reports.
Ryan Kellett, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center, said the most common use of artificial intelligence in journalism today is to drive away reporters and streamline work.
“The most common use of AI in journalism today is actually behind the scenes, something that the viewers can’t see,” Kellett said.
This can be used to format text, to transfer audio to writing, or to help reporters search website libraries to find images based on keywords. The adoption of generation AIs that not only handle content but also create content based on user input prompts has been filled with more skepticism in the industry due to ethical concerns, but the common uses of these tools include drafting headlines and creating article overviews.
Gannett previously made headlines for adoption of AI tools.
In 2023, the publisher got FLAK for a summary of sports generated by AI. Last year, the company deployed an AI-generated summary placed under the heading, quickly providing readers with a “critical point.” And the company recently announced plans to hire multiple AI positions in the sports division. This was criticised during contract negotiations, and often expressed dissatisfaction with the 2023 attempt in 2023 with AI-generated sports summaries.
“There’s a lot of slops out there,” said Mike Carraggi, product manager at Patch. He used AI to create morning newsletters from material published on human-inflicted websites and community submissions, saying patches can help serve more audiences than other ways.
“We were able to expand from 1,200 (the patch community) to over 7,000 in a few months without increasing our staff,” Carraggi said. According to Carraggi, the patch has 116 staff in Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Rhode Island. Others are provided only through AI-generated content.
One newsletter forwarded to GBH shows “talk” including weather, summary, local tally news at upcoming events, what neighbors are talking about on social media, job openings and more.
“In these new communities where there are no full-time reporters, we are now a platform. We are not publishers there — there’s a difference,” he said.
Local entrepreneur Winston Chen is trying to bring in AI to generate more newsrooms through the tools he created. He and David Trilling co-founded within Arlington in 2023 after hearing other residents complain that they could not attend town’s hours of meetings.
“We just said, “Why not shoot this new, fanged AI technology… do you use it to download audio from a local government meeting, use AI to transcribe the meeting, use another AI to summarise what happened in the meeting?”
He said that Trill would make sure the summary was free of errors. They spoke with leaders of new nonprofits in the Lexington, Belmont and Cape areas, but they still don’t know the idea.
“We built the technology so that it wasn’t inherent to Arlington,” he said. “We want to be able to provide this as a free service to the town and local media who want it.”
