From Semafor, February 17:
The Scoop
The New York Times is greenlighting the use of AI for its product and editorial staff, saying that internal tools could eventually write social copy, SEO headlines, and some code.
In messages to newsroom staff, the company announced that it’s opening up AI training to the newsroom, and debuting a new internal AI tool called Echo to staff, Semafor has learned. The Times also shared documents and videos laying out editorial do’s and don’t for using AI, and shared a suite of AI products that staff could now use to develop web products and editorial ideas.
“Generative AI can assist our journalists in uncovering the truth and helping more people understand the world. Machine learning already helps us report stories we couldn’t otherwise, and generative AI has the potential to bolster our journalistic capabilities even more,” the company’s editorial guidelines said.
“Likewise, the Times will become more accessible to more people through features like digitally voice[d] articles, translations into other languages, and uses of generative AI we have yet to discover. We view the technology not as some magical solution but as a powerful tool that, like many technological advances before, may be used in service of our mission.”
The company said it was approving a number of AI programs for editorial and product staff, including GitHub Copilot programming assistant for coding, Google’s Vertex AI for product development, NotebookLM, the NYT’s ChatExplorer, some Amazon AI products, and OpenAI’s non-ChatGPT API through the New York Times’ business account (only with approval from the company’s legal department). The Times also announced it had built Echo, an in-house beta summarization tool to allow journalists to condense Times articles, briefings, and interactives....
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