Note from Zack: How should newsrooms use AI?

It’s difficult to go anywhere these days without the subject of AI — artificial intelligence — coming up. It’s clear AI is going to have a significant impact on journalism. If you were to poll each member of our team, I know you’d get varying opinions.

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But we are curious about your thoughts too. Over the next two weeks, we’ll be asking our readers to share their opinions on artificial intelligence in relation to the work that we do. The survey opens today and will be open through Aug. 16.

These aren’t questions we’ve asked you before. And don’t worry, you don’t have to be an AI expert to participate.

The survey will help us understand your feelings and will be a key piece in helping identify where we focus our newsgathering efforts and how we may best maintain trust as we figure out how these tools might — or might not — help us do journalism.

We’ve had some experiments around AI, but our rule of thumb is not to trust anything it does for publication. Anything that AI does still has to be verified and determined to be true.

As our visual journalists document photos daily, we refrain from using AI-generated images unless they are disclosed to the audience and used to illustrate the capabilities of AI or provide an illustration.

As we explore how AI might play a role in our newsroom, we want to make sure we do so in a way that maintains your trust. Given the rapid pace of advancements in this space, we cannot ignore the tools and techniques. We’re committed to learning about AI, using it ethically and transparently, as we explore how it might support our journalism.

We, too, have questions about its use, benefits, and its future. That’s why we’re asking for your input about the use of AI in newsrooms.

The survey will ask you about some of the tasks we do – like transcribing interviews, building, and monitoring data sets. And to address the concern, we’re not looking at these AI tools as replacements for our journalists.

We invite you to participate in our brief survey, “How should newsrooms use AI?” that was developed in collaboration with two leading and respected national media organizations. Local Media Association/Local Media Foundation and Trusting News provided their expertise in coordinating the survey.

You can find the survey here.

The survey should take about five minutes to complete.

The Gazette is conducting the survey in collaboration with the Local Media Association/Local Media Foundation’s AI Community Journalism Lab and Trusting News.

By partnering with these groups and collaborating with other newsrooms across the country, we’ll start building a data set that we can use as a baseline for perceptions. We’ll be able to see if our results are similar or different from other regions of the country, and we’ll be able to see how these perceptions may change over time.

I want to say thank you in advance for taking the time to share your thoughts. Whether you’re enthusiastic or skeptical, your feedback will help us make responsible, transparent choices as we experiment with this technology.

Thanks for reading,

Zack Kucharski, Executive Editor