Even as the team under Jessica Bulthé, who heads data and insights at Mediahuis in Belgium, works to acclimatise journalists to AI, Bulthé was very clear on one point:

“We respect the fact that AI can create content, but not journalism. So, all our tools are amplifying the journalistic content that is written by humans. We do not create tools that can write articles by themselves and, therefore, replace journalists. We go for effectiveness rather than efficiency.”

The pitfalls of letting AI do the writing have been clearly demonstrated in the weeks past.

The Chicago Sun-Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer published a syndicated summer reading list of 15 novels, 10 of which did not exist. A freelancer used AI to write the list and provided it to King Features, a division of Hearst Newspapers.

“Even though it wasn’t our actual work, the Sun-Times became the poster child of ‘What could go wrong with AI?’” Sun-Times’ CEO wrote.

“Did AI play a part in our national embarrassment? Of course. But AI didn’t submit the stories, or send them out to partners, or put them in print. People did. At every step in the process, people made choices to allow this to happen.”

And indeed, it is also people who judiciously use AI tools to create fine journalism, as the winners and finalists of the Pulitzer Prize this year demonstrate. 

The Associated Press undertook a three-year investigation involving dozens of reporters and the creation of a database to document more than 1,000 deaths in which police officers subdued victims with methods intended to be non-lethal.

“In hundreds of cases, officers weren’t taught or didn’t follow best safety practices for physical force and weapons, creating a recipe for death,” the AP wrote. The victims were disproportionately Black Americans.

Reporters filed nearly 7,000 requests for death certificates, autopsy reports, and body-camera footage, receiving more than 200,000 pages of documents. No more than one-third of the cases the AP identified are listed in federal mortality data as involving law enforcement at all.

The news agency used optical character recognition to extract text from images of documents to index the causes of death and AI transcription for audio from hundreds of hours of police body camera footage.

Similarly, journalists from the Center for Public Integrity, Reveal, and Mother Jones used a custom image-recognition algorithm to go through 1.8 million handwritten land records to identify more than 1,000 formerly enslaved people who were given land after the U.S. Civil War — and then stripped of it months later after President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated.

The team also undertook genealogical research and created family trees for more than 100 of these freedmen and tracked down their descendants.

The Washington Post used object-detection models to identify military vehicles in satellite imagery because the visual forensic journalism team was examining the Israeli military’s explanation for killing two Al Jazeera journalists in Gaza.

The news brand obtained and reviewed drone footage. “No Israeli soldiers, aircraft, or other military equipment are visible in the footage taken that day — which the Post is publishing in its entirety — raising critical questions about why the journalists were targeted,” the Post said.

Similarly, a geospatial Artificial Intelligence firm called Preligens ran satellite imagery provided by the Post through its AI vehicle detector and did not find any armored vehicles within 9.7 square miles.

The Wall Street Journal used AI to map how Elon Musk’s rhetoric has shifted over time to become increasingly political, particularly after his acquisition of Twitter.

The news brand used AI to analyse more than 41,000 tweets by Musk, going back as far as 2019.

As Bulthé said: “If I can leave you with one thing today, it’s this: GenAI won’t kill journalism … . The journalists who adapt — with integrity, with curiosity, and with fire — they won’t just survive. They will lead.”

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