Insider Editor-in-Chief Calls on Journalists to Use ChatGPT Generative AI to Report Stories

ChatGPT and other generative AI platforms are now being welcomed into newsrooms as a reporting tool for journalists.

That’s the case, at least, at Insider, whose global editor-in-chief, Nich Carlson, announced via company memo Thursday that he encourages reporters, editors and producers to begin utilizing new artificial intelligence technology to help write their stories and complete their packages.

“Generative AI can make all of you better editors, reporters, and producers,” Carlson wrote, explaining that he’s experimented with ChatGPT for “many hours” and found it assisting with brainstorming ideas across projects, writing headlines, researching for assignments and preparing for interviews.

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With the memo, Carlson announced a new internal ChatGPT effort at Insider that will tap a pilot group of staffers to “experiment with it as a word processing aid and report back to the rest of us,” noting that chatbots and other AI platforms should not be used “to write sentences that you put into your scripts and articles” — but that “may change in the future.”

The memo was sent Thursday under the subject line “AI at Insider: We can use it to make us faster and better. It can be our ‘bicycle of the mind,'” and it laid the groundwork for where Carlson sees the Insider staff making the most of this new startup technology while additionally warning of ways to avoid “journalistic disaster” of plagiarism, falsehoods or worse.

Read part of Carlson’s memo, as shared by Semafor’s Max Tani, via transcript below:

I’ve spent many hours working with ChatGPT, and I can already tell having access to it is going to make me a better global editor-in-chief for Insider.

Just in the past couple of weeks it helped me think about how and what I wanted too ay in this memo, do casual background research for a post I assigned, brainstorm headline ideas, and prepare for a live interview. It read and summarized Alvin Bragg’s indictment and statement of facts in his case against Donald Trump in moments. I fed it some of the episode titles of one of our most popular video series and asked for future episode ideas. (I sent them to one of our executive producers and she said, “Holy moly! There are some really great ideas here. Thank you!”) I asked it to come up with ideas for trips for our travel reporters, asking it to make additional recommendations for other related places a half day’s trip away.

My takeaway after a fair amount of experimentation with ChatGPT is that generative AI can make all of you better editors, reporters, and producers, too.

Do not use ChatGPT or other chatbots and versions of AI to write sentences that you put into your scripts and articles.

This may change in the future. But before we make that change, we are going to ask a pilot group of experienced producers, editors, and reporters to experiment with it as a word processing aid and report back to the rest of us. If you are interested in joining this pilot group, please let me know. It will be exciting and important work for Insider.

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Anyone joining this group will receive three important warnings:

Generative AI can introduce falsehoods into the copy it produces. Research it provided me for this memo was wrong, as I discovered when I fact-checked it. You cannot trust Generative AI as a source of truth. Doing so can lead to journalistic disaster. AI can also introduce bias into text it generates. When it comes to facts, generative AI should be viewed as a resource similar to Wikipedia or a factoid at the top of a Google search-result page: that is, a great starting point that helps you find more reliable sources. ChatGPT is a language generator that performs calculations to guess at the next best word. It doesn’t understand facts or meaning, and it doesn’t know whether an assertion is right or wrong, much less fair. It is not a journalist — You are. Not matter the tool you use, AI or otherwise, journalists at Insider are ultimately responsible for the accuracy of their stories. Always verify your facts.

Generative AI may lift passages from other people’s work and present it as original text. Do not plagiarize! Always verify originality. Best company practices for doing so are likely to evolve, but for now, at a minimum, make sure you are funning any passages received from ChatGPT through Google search and Grammarly’s plagiarism search.

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A third, less serious, warning is that text generated by AI can be dull and generic. Take what it gives you as a suggestion: something to rewrite into your own voice and in Insider’s style. Make sure you stand by and are proud of what you file.

For these reasons and others, generative AI is tricky to use as a text drafting tool, and that’s why we are limiting experimentation with using it in this way to a small pilot group. We’re excited to hear what they learn. Already it’s obvious that ChatGPT can help a reporter bust through writer’s block and generate ideas for a lede, kicker, or transitions. Our suggestion to the pilot group will be to take copy and rewrite the output until they’re satisfied with it.

But beyond that use case, now is absolutely the time for the rest of use o begin experimenting with this powerful yet poorly understood new technology.

Here are some ideas for how it may help you:

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Use AI to generate outlines for your stories, or to help structure a post that you’re struggling with. This could help a lot with writer’s block.

Save your editors precious time they are currently spending fixing typos and cleaning up copy. Ask AI to make suggested edits to your writing to make it more readable and concise. Please see below for an important caution on this use case.*

Use AI to suggest SEO-optimized headlines and meta descriptions.

Tell AI who you are planning to interview and what you hope to get out of it, and ask for interview question ideas. This also works well for prepping for panels and interviews.

Ask AI to explain tricky, unfamiliar concepts. (“What happens if the US fails to raise the debt ceiling?”)

Ask AI to summarize old news stories and suggest lessons that can be learned from them. For example: How did John Edwards avoid conviction and what lessons should future prosecutors learn from it?”

*Do not put sensitive information, particularly sourcing details, into ChatGPT. The AI companies employ humans who can see conversations with their bots.

I encourage all of you to try those prompts, and then try a million more of your own creation.

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