15 news brands experiment with AI in unique ways
Generative AI Initiative Blog | 02 February 2025
There are some really cool AI projects under way right now, at large news organisations and at small ones, from which we can all draw some inspiration.
Here’s a look at some of them:
• The New York Times built an AI tool that combed through more than 300,000 words written over 20 years to find trends, themes, and inflection points in travel. They used semantic search rather than specific keywords to better understand the content.

• The British Broadcasting Corporation has been using AI to subtitle programmes as well as to generate short-form animated sequences (rather than static images). They also provide AI transcripts of commentary for live sports and identify key moments of football matches, a popular option with fans.
“The Gen AI tools are impressive, the accuracy levels are improving, and the pilots suggest we could unlock significantly more value for audiences,” said Rhodri Talfan Davies, director of BBC Nations.
• Similarly, U.S.-based Warner Brothers is using GenAI for captioning and finding the quality of the output is actually higher than it was with manual captioning. Also interesting: They found an 80% reduction in the time taken for captioning and a 50% reduction in costs.

• The JournalismAI programme run by the London School of Economics also has some interesting projects under way:
How could a 2,000-word article be presented — as a decision tree, interactive game, calculator, FAQs, or a summary — to help users find the information they want most? The team at India’s Scroll.in is building an AI-based tool that will repurpose news articles into different formats to share information more quickly.
Lebanon’s Raseef22 has created Ask Aunty, a “friendly” AI chatbot for Arabic speakers to anonymously ask sexual and reproductive health questions. Envisioned as a “quirky aunt,” it offers quick answers from the news brand’s archives and trusted sources, using an informal tone.
Ukrainian news organisation Babel faces staffing challenges amid migration and as people are called up to serve in the war. It plans to create AI avatars that replicate its journalists’ voices and appearances to allow content production to continue.
Argentina’s Chequado is building an AI-powered assistant that helps small newsrooms debunk or validate news through fact-checking. Similarly, Spain’s Newtral is building a multi-modal AI tool that identifies false content on Telegram, which it points out is a “key platform for spreading hoaxes.” It monitors the most viral disinformation in real time, both as text and audio, and also sends alerts to fact-checkers.
In a similar vein, Brazil’s Gênero e Número is developing a tool to track gendered disinformation on YouTube, focusing on how influencers promote narratives that undermine women’s and gay rights, while U.S.-based Verified News Network is creating a chat product to strengthen media literacy in Indigenous communities.
In Nigeria, The Republic is using AI to translate content into indigenous African languages and audio, while ICIR Nigeria is transcribing audio and video into text in three major Nigerian languages. El Surti in Paraguay is working on a similar project to address the linguistic gap in AI systems for seven million Guarani speakers.
Digitalhaus Franken in Germany is developing an AI-driven system to predict subscriber cancellation probability and recommend interventions before the customer churns.
In South Africa, Daily Maverick is using AI to increase reader revenue conversion and helping improve reader engagement as well as subscriber retention.
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