{"id":254824,"date":"2025-11-01T15:35:08","date_gmt":"2025-11-01T15:35:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/254824\/"},"modified":"2025-11-01T15:35:08","modified_gmt":"2025-11-01T15:35:08","slug":"the-globe-has-updated-its-newsroom-ai-guidelines","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/254824\/","title":{"rendered":"The Globe has updated its newsroom AI guidelines"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

AI can only ever be used with a human in the loop and only in ways that assist journalists, not to replace them.Ryan Remiorz\/The Canadian Press<\/p>\n

It\u2019s been more than two years since The Globe and Mail published its first-ever guidelines on the journalistic use of artificial intelligence. The memo sent to the newsroom on April 20, 2023, was shared on The Globe\u2019s website June 14, 2023, and two days later an e-mail from editor-in-chief David Walmsley directed subscribers to it and invited them to contact me with questions or concerns. <\/p>\n

That first memo was about 800 words long. The updated guidance, which was shared internally with the newsroom in October, runs more than 2,000 words. If you were to guess that the rapid progress and rampant spread of AI technology have necessitated a lengthier and more detailed roadmap for the newsroom, you\u2019d be right.<\/p>\n

Because the original memo has been replaced on the website<\/a> with a brief, high-level note rather than the full document, I want to share some of its key points here. <\/p>\n

The fundamentals haven\u2019t changed: AI can only ever be used with a human in the loop and only in ways that assist journalists, not to replace them. And when permitted uses of AI have contributed to The Globe\u2019s journalism, it must be clearly labelled, with a description of how AI has been used.<\/p>\n

The updated guidance touches on the ways AI and machine learning can be used outside of the newsroom, to help ensure The Globe\u2019s journalism is seen and read \u2013 for example by personalizing the homepage you see on The Globe\u2019s website, or \u201cnoticing\u201d the kinds of stories you like to read after work and suggesting more of those when you\u2019re on the site at that time of day. (One of the best explanations of machine learning that I\u2019ve found is from the website of MIT\u2019s Sloan School of Management<\/a>: \u201cMachine learning is a subfield of artificial intelligence that gives computers the ability to learn without explicitly being programmed.\u201d)<\/p>\n

The guidance also cautions that \u201cgenerative AI technology has some fundamental flaws that make it unsuitable for core writing and editing work.\u201d For one thing, generative AI is only as good as the information that was used to train it, so it isn\u2019t a reliable research tool. <\/p>\n

AI output has been found to contain race and gender biases, hallucinations and factual errors. It can also be sycophantic \u2013 that is, it tells users what they want to hear. The newsroom guidance document points to this post by Open AI<\/a>, which admits they \u201cmissed\u201d this problem in an update to a version of their chatbot, ChatGPT. <\/p>\n

The bot, they said, \u201caimed to please the user, not just as flattery, but also as validating doubts, fueling anger, urging impulsive actions, or reinforcing negative emotions in ways that were not intended. Beyond just being uncomfortable or unsettling, this kind of behaviour can raise safety concerns \u2013 including around issues like mental health, emotional over-reliance or risky behaviour.\u201d<\/p>\n

The new guidance also urges caution around the use of seemingly benign AI tools such as voice-to-text transcription and even copy-checking functions: \u201cEven seemingly innocuous requests like cleaning up typos and grammar can introduce errors, and summarization can combine ideas in subtle ways that alter the meaning of a passage or quote. This risks our reputation and the accuracy of our reporting.\u201d Further, it says, \u201cSome AI tools may require users waive certain rights in their content. Because of this, stories \u2013 including unedited drafts or unpublished stories \u2013 cannot be put through Al tools outside of use cases cleared by our legal team.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since the first version of The Globe\u2019s AI guidelines was published, the international journalism community has learned a great deal about artificial intelligence. Progress has been made. For the second year in a row, in 2025 submissions for the Pulitzer Prize in journalism required disclosure of AI use, a rule that has allowed prize administrators to get a sense of how top journalists are using AI in the research and presentation of their work. <\/p>\n

\u201c[AI] technology, when used appropriately, seems to add agility, depth and rigour to projects in ways that were not possible a decade ago,\u201d Marjorie Miller, a long-time senior journalist at the Associated Press and administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes, told Nieman Lab<\/a>. For example, AI tools can power through huge volumes of data much faster than humans can; they are also great at recognizing patterns that humans wouldn\u2019t \u2013 at least, not quickly. <\/p>\n

Among the prizes awarded last year was a 2023 New York Times investigation<\/a> in which journalists used AI for pattern recognition. \u201cThe Pulitzer-winning team trained a tool that could identify the craters left behind by 2,000-pound bombs, one of the largest in Israel\u2019s weapons arsenal. The Times used the tool to review satellite imagery and confirm hundreds of those bombs were dropped by the Israeli military in southern Gaza, particularly in areas that had been marked as safe for civilians,\u201d Nieman Lab said<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Some mistakes<\/a> have been made as well. And in many ways, AI has become much scarier. Remember that scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey in which the sentient computer HAL refuses to open the pod bay doors<\/a> at his human operator\u2019s urgent command? In June, some 57 years after the release of the film, San Francisco-based development firm Anthropic<\/a> shared that stress-tested LLMs (large-language models, a type of AI) \u201cresorted to malicious insider behaviors.\u201d<\/p>\n

The New York Post was markedly less chill in its decree<\/a>: \u201c\u2018Malicious\u2019 AI willing to sacrifice human lives to avoid being shut down, shocking study reveals.\u201d <\/p>\n

Even setting aside the Post\u2019s reputation for sensationalist<\/a> headlines, the finding is discomfiting, to say the least.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s why guardrails \u2013 such as the newsroom\u2019s guidance document \u2013 are essential.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: AI can only ever be used with a human in the loop and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":210011,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,276,277,49,48,5152,118556,61],"class_list":{"0":"post-254824","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-ca","12":"tag-canada","13":"tag-dei","14":"tag-public-editor","15":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254824","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=254824"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254824\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/210011"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=254824"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=254824"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=254824"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}