The Cleveland Plain Dealer had been in the news business 20 years when it reported President Abraham Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Now the famous paper is blazing a trail as the first to welcome an AI reporter that will publish stories based on a reporter’s notes.
A related story by Yahoo! News, written by a human reporter, says the Plain Dealer hired an “AI rewrite specialist” whose job is turning reporters’ notes into “publishable” articles.
Chris Quinn, the Plain Dealer’s veteran top editor, has overseen the newspaper’s transformation into the digital age. In a February column, he predicted artificial intelligence is the “future” of newsrooms and predicts it will make reporters be “faster, more thorough and more comprehensible.”
Michael Morris, of the Media Research Center, says the editor better be careful.
“AI will hallucinate and occasionally it will completely fabricate information, make up things, and present its own facts, and then even create false sources for the facts that it's created,” he told American Family News.
AFN, which sometimes uses Google AI and ChatGPT for story research, has witnessed AI demonstrate biased conclusions only to admit its error – “good catch!” – when its skewed conclusion is pointed out by a human.
Even though it’s possible to use AI responsibly for editing and for story ideas, Morris warned AI is biased because it’s “fed a steady diet of elitist media pushing the Left's narrative.”
According to the Yahoo! News article, the big change at the Plain Dealer comes after the newspaper has shrunk from a 400-member staff in the 1990s to just 71 employees today.
