What happened when a newspaper let AI take over
Quote:Cerasa said the idea of integrating AI into Il Foglio first took shape about a year ago. The newspaper began publishing one article a week written by AI, without disclosing it, and asked readers to guess which article had been written by AI. Those who guessed correctly would be prompted to subscribe to Il Foglio and get a free bottle of champagne. Cerasa said most readers guessed correctly and were “enthusiastic” about the experiment. The cases in which readers guessed incorrectly convinced him that his writers’ work was too commonplace, not creative enough, and that Il Foglio had to “improve our journalism,” he said.
About two months ago, Cerasa had the idea to launch a limited edition written entirely by AI and ran tests by feeding prompts into ChatGPT Pro. Every day for the past week, Cerasa has asked ChatGPT to produce articles about a particular topic and told it to stay faithful to the editorial line of Il Foglio — which Cerasa describes as pro-European, pro-globalization and anti-populist.
Far from producing content equal to a human’s, Cerasa said ChatGPT has produced articles with factual errors or typos, invented events that never actually happened, and produced monotonous and stale writing. His solution: Assign two (human) journalists to fact-check the articles before they are published in Foglio AI. Fake news is removed but minor errors and bad writing are left in, he said, because he believes they show the limitations of AI.
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