In the first world, an Italian newspaper has been a fully AI-generated version for a month that its director said on Thursday that “not to revive journalism, not to kill it”.
Il Phoglio, a daily broad sheet with an irreversible touch and the circulation of around 29,000 states that it is the first newspaper in the world to print the entire versions created through artificial intelligence, a newborn technique that is rapidly changing how the news room operates.
It produced a four-plate daily AI version in print and online on Tuesday, with its general version, about 22 articles and three editorials.
Simply put, the 20-odd journalist of the newspaper asks a version of the chatgate chatbot of Openai to write a story on a specific topic in a specific tone, and it creates a text using the information scraped from the Internet.
Examples of this week included analysis of the speeches of Prime Minister Georgia Meloni, which was an editorial on a recent phone call between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin – and a fashion story.
Claudio SERASA, director of Il Phoglio, explained the idea behind the project to AFP and how it is going on.
What do you want to achieve with it?
“The purpose is two times. On the one hand, to move the principle to behave. On the other hand, it is to test itself and thus understands what the boundaries of AI are, but also opportunities, boundaries that should be away and which cannot be.
“All this can spring from a particular newspaper like us, because we have a newspaper that has irreversible, irony, creative writing. We do things that are not easily copyable with a machine.
“It was a desire to be especially and using with what no one in the world has used, in a disruptive manner, but at the top, first, first tried to understand themselves how AI could be integrated with natural intelligence.”
How does the process work in practice?
“In the editorial meeting, many topics come up. Some of these subjects are then covered not only by general newspaper, but also by artificial newspaper.
“Each question asked by AI includes a request for a subject … a request for a tone: respectable, irreversible, condemnable, stimulating. Finally we call it for the style of paper.
“If there are a lot of mistakes, we change the article (start a new). If there are some errors, however, we leave them, because we also want to understand what boundaries are.”
What lesson have you learned for the first few days?
“Artificial Intelligence is more than all expectations. We have learned that it can do things that can compete with a human being, but we have learned that long -term competition should be created.
“Innovation must be accepted, as you cannot stop it, it should be understood, ruled, and should be turned into an opportunity for development.
“If one day there is a demand for articles made with AI, it should be accepted. But that demand should increase the creativity of journalists, as journalists should not have the habit of doing things that a machine could do.
“So this is a way to revive journalism, not to kill it.”
Are journalists worried in the news room?
“No, everyone entertains, everyone is curious and among other things, it is interesting that we are reaching very big audiences with this experiment. There are many people who are searching for traditional paper, thanks to AI, we had increased sales by 60 percent on the first day.
“It is no coincidence that no big newspaper has thought of (to do), because it is clearly scary. A newspaper like us, which is somewhat unique, can do an experiment like this.”
He said: “The articles written by humans are better, because they always have something else, they always have an element of creativity, to make a connection, unexpected links that AI does not have.”
What are the readers saying?
“Readers have been entertained 90 percent, 10 percent are concerned because they say ‘make sure you never leave your natural intelligence because you are better.” But there is no one who says that the operation is stupid and insensitive.
“Everyone has understood the soul.”
(Except for the headline, the story has not been edited by NDTV employees and is published by a syndicated feed.)
