We fear AI taking over the world. But wouldn’t it be great if it could take over some tedious tasks and free us up to do great things? It can.
The recording of the October Decoder Dialogue, “From Newsrooms to Classrooms: Real Talk about Artificial Intelligence” streamed live on 29 October 2024.
In News Decoder’s Top Tips, we share advice for young people from experts in journalism, media literacy and education. In this week’s Top Tip, News Decoder Educational News Director Marcy Burstiner lays out some suggestions, from a panel of students and experts in a recent “Decoder Dialogue” for using artificial intelligence to help you be a better reporter and storyteller. You can find more of our learning resources here. And learn how you can incorporate our resources and services into your classroom or educational program or by forming a News Decoder Club in your school.
People are leery about artificial intelligence. That’s what one survey taken back in January found. But the interesting thing is that many of those who distrust AI, seem to trust it more than humans.
The Ipsos Consumer Tracker survey found, for example, that only 43% of respondents said they trust AI to not show bias against any one group of people — but that’s 5% more than the survey found for people saying they trust humans to do the same.
Since News Decoder works with students and journalists, we wondered how people felt about artificial intelligence in the classroom and newsrooms. We gathered a panel of students from the American University of Paris, Kepler College in Rwanda and School Year Abroad France, and experts in the fields of education and media for our monthly virtual roundtable series, “Decoder Dialogues.” You can check out the full recording of that session above.
Out of that discussion came some suggestions for how AI could help you in research and reporting.
Spur creativity.
Swedish educator Johan Sköld suggested that AI can help generate ideas and that could spur creativity. Following up on that, Nikita Roy, a data scientist and journalist, noted as an example the use of AI in newsrooms to help generate ideas for headlines.
In this way, artificial intelligence can help speed up production of news stories by taking some time-consuming tasks off the hands of journalists and editors. In a world where people work remotely, this can help make up for the lack of personal interactions.
Before the popularity of remote work, journalists would often brainstorm with colleagues ideas for headlines but that is more difficult when people work from home.
When AI suggests headlines it might spark your brain to come up with even better ideas.
Generate story ideas.
When I taught investigative reporting my class would often go through a round of interviews we called the “fishing expedition.”
That’s where you seek out people and ask questions simply to be pointed in the right direction. The people you talk to can steer you to the most important story to pursue. You might want to do a story on local pollution, but should you focus on a nearby river, air quality, manufacturing plants or wildlife? You seek out people on the street or experts to help you narrow down a big topic into the most pressing story. But it is a time consuming process.
AI can point you in that right direction with much less time and effort.
Roy spoke about a news organization in Norway that built an AI app that goes into government archives and web portals, finds and scans all new reports that come out and summarizes them for the reporters. In this way, the reporters can quickly find stories they should report on without having to waste time reading through tedious, irrelevant reports.
“So just imagine before these journalists would have to go manually to every single web portal, see if new information has been posted and decide is anything newsworthy? And then go on to see if they could write a story,” she said.
The product manager told her that the app took them from spending about two hours a day going through documents to just 20 minutes.
“And they produced not just more journalism, but better journalism because they were able to find a lot more useful stories,” Roy said.
Generate questions.
When reporters prepare for interviews — which are the heart of all news stories — they do research to inform their questions. AI can help you not only do basic research but also to identify questions that you should ask in interviews.
As a reporter, I had the tendency to forget to ask obvious questions. I appreciated it when an editor or fellow reporter would say: “Don’t forget to ask about…”
Question prompts from an AI app can serve the role of that colleague or assignment editor who will suggest questions to reporters that they might not have considered. It can be the person looking over your shoulder that sometimes you need.
Dive deep.
Roy noted that data journalists are using AI to find information they would not be able to find on their own. It could give journalists who don’t have the experience of seasoned investigative reporters from large organizations the ability to take on complicated stories.
Evidence of occurrences of something wrong happening, that might have taken months to uncover, can be found in much shorter amounts of time through the power of AI searches.
Add extras.
I spent my career as a journalist in small newsrooms and often found myself jealous of the ability of reporters at bigger organizations to do fancy things with their stories: Cool graphics, impressive data and extra features like maps and glossaries and timelines. But AI can produce those extras and graphics, empowering freelancers and those who operate one-person news sites.
I’ve been binge watching the old TV show “Alias” about the CIA and a nefarious counterspy organization called SD-6, that starred Jennifer Garner and Bradley Cooper. It’s completely far-fetched. But the one aspect I found most ridiculous was this: In early episodes Cooper plays an investigative reporter at a small local newspaper in Los Angeles and he has an assistant who helps him with basic research and digging up sources.
An assistant? I worked at half a dozen small news organizations and I never saw a reporter with an assistant. What I would have given for an assistant!
But Eunice Furaha, a student at Kepler College in Rwanda, said that’s one way she uses AI.
“It’s not that easy to navigate different resources online,” Furaha said. “But when I use AI I can ask a question, I learn from it, hear what it is telling me and maybe compare it with what I already tried to search before and in that way I am going to have a bigger view of what I am talking about or what I need to answer. I can use it in my own thinking. It is adding more ideas to me.”
Offload tedious tasks.
Roy said that many of the tasks journalists do are rote and time consuming: converting audio interviews into transcripts, for example and conducting basic internet searches for sources.
When you are on a tight deadline, turning basic tasks over to AI gives you more time to add context to a story or interview more people for more perspectives.
So now, you and I can have Bradley Cooper’s assistant in the guise of artificial intelligence, freeing us up to do more important work, make our stories more compelling and leaving us more time to report on more on things that really matter. News Decoder, with our partner Mobile Stories, has even developed a guide for using AI ethically in your stories.
But as you let artificial intelligence help you with story ideas or generate creativity or take over tedious tasks, be careful. Just as you wouldn’t leave an assistant to do work completely unsupervised, you need to keep a close eye on your AI app. Violetta DiChiera Walsh, a student at School Year Abroad, said she worries about the quality of sources AI might rely on.
“One thing can get cited improperly and then it just spirals,” DiChiera Walsh said. “It can be credibly cited as a real source when it’s actually something someone just said. And I feel like that has become more prevalent with AI, which makes me nervous.”
Three questions to consider:
- How can AI help save you time as a reporter or researcher?
- How can AI spur your own creativity?
- Why do you think many people trust artificial intelligence over humans performing the same tasks?
Marcy Burstiner is the educational news director for News Decoder. She is a graduate of the Columbia Journalism School and professor emeritus of journalism and mass communication at the California Polytechnic University, Humboldt in California. She is the author of the book Investigative Reporting: From premise to publication.