The Times is playing catch-up to search and summarization tools that have become a common feature of many websites, apps, inboxes, and even other news media organizations.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a small step that, according to several Times employees I spoke to last week, is necessary to improve the paper\u2019s internal search tools, which have long lagged its otherwise best-in-class publishing products.<\/p>\n
A several-sentence summary of existing Times journalism based solely on the Times\u2019 own work is not the most ambitious implementation of AI in news media. But figuring out how to implement generative AI is a trickier task for the Times in particular, a news institution that is obsessed with accuracy and attention to detail. While the paper regularly makes mistakes and appends corrections, it also works hard to avoid them, with layers of painstaking fact-checking and editing.<\/p>\n
Embracing AI poses obvious risks to accuracy, particularly as the Times\u2019 political enemies look to discredit the paper\u2019s journalism. What\u2019s to stop a malicious actor from spending all day trying to trip up the paper\u2019s AI summarization tools to get it to say something stupid?<\/p>\n
But the paper\u2019s emphasis on AI tools also could potentially undermine a larger point the Times has made to readers. In an era where deepfakes, bots, and hallucinations have undermined the fabric of reality, news media organizations like the Times have positioned themselves as the remaining arbiters of truth, bulwarks against AI-fueled disinformation. Removing humans from the equation, even in a small way, cuts against the fundamental value of their journalism in the AI era.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Times is playing catch-up to search and summarization tools that have become a common feature of many…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":328078,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[9,11,10],"class_list":["post-328077","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328077","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=328077"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328077\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/328078"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=328077"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=328077"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=328077"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}