CLEVELAND — In the age of printed newspapers, it was easy to figure out who reported on a story: just look at the byline.
However, since the advent of the internet and the explosive growth of artificial intelligence, it has become more and more difficult to figure out fact from fiction and who is behind it.
ChatGPT and other AI offerings allow users the ability to create anything they wish by inputting a simple command.
"Artificial intelligence is getting more and more complex and easier to use, so it’s made it a lot more difficult to figure out what's true and what’s false online," said Alex Mahadevan, director of MediaWise at The Poynter Institute.
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While the tools being used to manipulate news consumers are changing, Mahadevan told News 5 that the tips to better inform individuals remain the same:
- Checking the source of information to see if it's credible
- Utilizing search engines to reverse image search and verify images are real and related to a news story
- Keeping your emotions in check
"Highly charged, anger-inducing stories are what go viral, and a majority of the time, they’re filled with misinformation," Mahadevan added.
As News 5 previously reported, the Pew Research Center released new survey data in 2022 related to the public’s views of artificial intelligence, how the technology would be used and what safeguards would be in place. The survey found that 37% of respondents were more concerned than excited, while 45% were equally concerned and excited.
How AI should not be used as part of local journalism
At E.W. Scripps, the parent company that owns this TV station and dozens of others across the country, Steve Turnham serves on our newly formed AI governance committee, set up to address if and how certain AI tools can be used to help aid our reporting.
"AI can’t ask follow up questions," said Turnham, the Washington D.C. bureau chief and managing editor for Scripps News. "AI can’t be on the scene and can’t earn the trust of families in peril and difficult circumstances. AI cannot assess the blast radius of a train that derailed. There are primary reporting functions that generative AI will never be able to do."
Similar to how a search on Google returns a long list of results filtered by keywords, AI simply pulls text from the far reaches of the internet and breaks it up into smaller bits and pieces.
While AI could write an online article or a TV news story, Turham points out AI isn’t bound by truth or ethics, instead just completing the task it’s presented with the information it can find online.
"It’s not in our business to go back and report what’s already on the internet," Turnham explained. "It’s our business to go out and find what’s happening and new and unknown. That’s something AI is not capable of. AI looks backwards, we look at the present and forward. That’s a big difference."
How AI is being used to better local journalism
That's not to say AI does not and should not exist in any form in the news-gathering process.
Everyday use of AI might not appear as ominous as ChatGPT writing news stories, but it is present in newsrooms and has been for quite some time.
When a reporter is traveling to a breaking news story and Google Maps reroutes them to avoid traffic, AI made that determination to send them a different route.
Programs like Grammarly that can help improve sentence structure and correct mistakes in emails are also driven by artificial intelligence. Several companies, such as Trint, Slack, and Otter.AI, offer the ability to transcribe videos, giving a reporter the ability to quickly search when a certain topic was mentioned during a news conference or hearing.
"It’s very important in a research kind of back-end way," Turnham said. "The key point is we use AI to guide us in a direction, but we go back, we listen, or we are present there ideally when we can be, and we take note of it and we use AI as a tool or a map to what happened."
Clay LePard is a special projects reporter at News 5 Cleveland. Follow him on Twitter @ClayLePard or on Facebook Clay LePard News 5.
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